The history of the collection goes back to the seventeenth century, although the Coin Room itself was opened only in 1922. It was formed by combining the original holdings of the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum with over sixty former private and college collections.
On 24 October 1922 about one hundred persons, headed by the Vice-Chancellor of the University, assembled in Oxford at the Ashmolean Museum; in the company were a number of numismatists, whose names are still remembered today – Arthur Evans, G. F. Hill, Ernest Babelon, Théodore Reinach, and George MacDonald. The occasion was the public opening of the University’s newly constituted Coin Room. For Evans it was a moment of personal triumph, for the unification under a single roof of Oxford’s numismatic and archaeological resources was something for which he had striven for nearly forty years. In his address on that day he said “it would not be human – it would not certainly be honest – if I did not confess to a special personal satisfaction . . . at the opening of the Coin Room in the Ashmolean Museum. It is in fact the realization of a project for which I have contended from the very beginning of my actual Keepership in 1884, and was embodied in my Report in 1885 to the Visitors”.
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Read more in The Heberden Coin Room
Origin and Development by C.M. Kraay and C.H.V. Sutherland.
