ASCS: Australasian Society for Classical Studies

NZACT: New Zealand Association of Classical Teachers

RNSNZ: Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand

Aotearoa’s museums, often working with limited resources compared to their counterparts in Europe and the United States (McKay 2023), have been significantly shaped throughout history by the time and energy of key individuals and the specialist knowledge and expertise that they could bring to enhance their institution’s discrete collections. Regarding some of the Mediterranean collections held at various institutions throughout Aotearoa, we may think of people such as Marion Steven for the Teece Museum’s Logie Collection (Wiltshire 2021), Wili Fels for the ancient Greek numismatic collection at the Otago Museum (Otago Museum 2014; Osland et al. 2025), or Fred Waite for the Egyptian collection at the Auckland Museum (Emmitt and Furey 2018). The list of names of major contributors to museum collections of all kinds throughout Aotearoa is of course hardly exhaustive, and there remain many more contributors whose lives and legacies are perhaps less known, though they are certainly no less worthy of our attention.

One such contributor is Christoph (Chris) Traugott Hermann Rudolph Ehrhardt (1937–2001),¹ an academic in the Classics department at the University of Otago from 1972 to 1996 and Honorary Curator for the ancient Greek and Roman coin collection in the Otago Museum. This article records Ehrhardt’s major contribution to the study of ancient Greek and Roman coins in Aotearoa and his legacy of important work for the Auckland Museum’s numismatic collections specifically. Although he was based in Dunedin, Ehrhardt did extensive work on ancient numismatic collections around Aotearoa, including the one held by the Auckland Museum which, with 1,457 specimens, is the second largest ancient numismatic collection of all the museums and universities in the country (Lewis and Emmitt 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025). Ehrhardt brought his specialist knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world and extensive experience with ancient numismatics to the Auckland Museum where he comprehensively organised, identified, and catalogued its ancient Greek and Roman coin collection for the first time. Thanks to Ehrhardt’s meticulous work, the Greek and Roman coin collection was left in a prime position to be the starting point for the Auckland Museum’s future development of its wider numismatic collection (Lewis and Emmitt 2025). Furthermore, this renewed attention to the collection, made possible by the legacy of Ehrhardt’s work, has enabled the Auckland Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman coin collection to be a focus in the booming discussions across Aotearoa and Australia concerning the place and significance of ancient Mediterranean collections in the Australasian context (Ash and Harrison 2025; Richards and Minchin 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025).

One of Chris Ehrhardt’s most enduring legacies is his extensive work on ancient Greek and Roman numismatics in Aotearoa. While a member of the Otago Classics department, Ehrhardt was also for many years the Honorary Curator for the ancient Greek and Roman coin collection at the Otago Museum. Ehrhardt’s access to this collection – which, with around 2,500 specimens, is the largest at a public institution in Aotearoa (Osland et al. 2025) – was not the only factor that contributed to his becoming one of the most important ancient numismatists in the history of the field in the country. Numismatics was an early area of interest for Ehrhardt, and a topic on which he published regularly (for example, Ehrhardt 1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1997, 2001, 2002). Ehrhardt’s godfather – like his father, a professor of Law and opponent of the Nazis – left him some money when he died, which he used to buy a large coin cabinet and a Greek coin (Ehrhardt 1996). Over the years, Ehrhardt developed his own personal collection of coins, which was once dramatically stolen from his home in a burglary, though he was able to recover a few of the stolen specimens (Ehrhardt 1996). Chris Ehrhardt’s daughter recalls that, despite the security risk, he enjoyed showing his coins to audiences when giving educational talks to the community, and delighted in sharing his knowledge about their origins, iconography, and significance. His approach to numismatics was evidently interested in the wealth of information that coins can provide about the ancient contexts that produced them. Ehrhardt’s numismatic interest is further evident through his involvement with the Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand (RNSNZ), of which he was a long-time and active member, serving for several years as one of the Society’s vice-presidents (Hargreaves 2002) and as president of its Otago branch (Ehrhardt 1988). He was a regular contributor to the RNSNZ’s periodical, the “New Zealand Numismatic Journal”.

Ehrhardt was by no means the first or only scholar or to write about ancient Greek and Roman coins in the collections of Aotearoa’s museums and universities. However, he stands out as exceptional in that he wrote on at least some aspect of every one of these collections and seems to be the first person to attempt to approach them comprehensively. Part of Ehrhardt’s motivation for working on these collections was a desire to publish a New Zealand addition to the corpus of catalogues in the “Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum” (SNG) project, which seeks to record collections of ancient Greek coins around the world (Ehrhardt 1993). Ehrhardt discussed his aims in this regard via written correspondence with Kenneth Sheedy, author of the first Australian SNG volume (Sheedy 2008), and current director of the Australian Centre for Ancient Numismatic Studies at Macquarie University. Between 1974 and 1993, Ehrhardt visited, viewed, and published extensively on these museum and university collections of ancient Greek and Roman coins, recording most of the approximately 6000 specimens held at seventeen different institutions across sixteen of Aotearoa’s towns and cities (Ehrhardt 1993). It is thus thanks to Ehrhardt’s work over this period of nearly two decades that scholars today have a good idea of the number and distribution of ancient Greek and Roman coins in Aotearoa’s public collections, especially when it comes to the smaller collections outside the major urban centres.

The most substantial of Ehrhardt’s contributions to ancient numismatics in Aotearoa is a published catalogue in six volumes of the ancient Greek coins in the Otago Museum (Ehrhardt 1974–1981). The Otago Museum’s Roman coins had previously been catalogued and published by Hamilton (1955a, 1955b). Ehrhardt published further lists of coins that he was able to view at other institutions in Aotearoa, including specimens in the collections of the University of Auckland and the Canterbury Museum (Ehrhardt 1977), the Southland Museum (Ehrhardt 1979), the Whanganui Museum (Ehrhardt 1982), various museums in Northland (Ehrhardt 1991f), Gisborne (Ehrhardt 1984b), and Napier (Ehrhardt 1995a). Ehrhardt also wrote about a hoard of early Byzantine coins in the Otago Museum discovered in Egypt (1994a). As discussed in greater detail later in this article, Ehrhardt produced twelve unpublished documents listing and discussing 271 Greek and 1014 Roman coins in the Auckland Museum’s collection (Ehrhardt 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1991d, 1991e, 1991g, 1991h, 1991i, 1991j, 1991k, 1991l, 1991m). The only collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins that Ehrhardt was unable to either see for himself or find adequately detailed records for is that kept at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand in Wellington (Ehrhardt 1993).

Ehrhardt summarised his extensive work on the numismatic collections across Aotearoa’s universities and museums in an article published in the proceedings of the Eleventh International Numismatic Congress, held in Brussels in 1991 (Ehrhardt 1993). This article, with its succinct yet comprehensive discussion and useful bibliography and appendices, constitutes a foundational source for virtually all novel research on ancient Greek and Roman numismatics in Aotearoa. Ehrhardt notes that an important aspect of these collections is that, at least from a purely ancient numismatic perspective, they are relatively unremarkable:

I have found no exciting specimen of new variety of Greek and Roman coins in New Zealand, […] but in general, the holdings are what one might expect from the amalgamation of modest private collections […] combined with souvenirs brought back from the Mediterranean area, particularly in the course of the two world wars (Ehrhardt 1993).

Ehrhardt’s point regarding the lack of novelty of specimens in these collections is an important one for future research in ancient numismatics in Aotearoa. The collections in our museums and universities can scarcely hold a candle to those held in the counterpart institutions in Europe, or even Australia, in terms of how they might facilitate our understanding of ancient Greece, Rome, and other Mediterranean contexts. However, Ehrhardt’s other observation here about the modern provenances of these collections, though he does not seem to have explored the matter in any depth himself, is a useful point for guiding fresh research into ancient coins and other Mediterranean artefacts kept in the museums and universities of Aotearoa (Ash and Harrison 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025).

Provenance studies are an essential part of research into these kinds of collections for many reasons, playing an important part in upholding the legal and ethical obligations of museums, contributing to transparency, and helping to spread public awareness about crucial issues such as the rights of indigenous peoples over their cultural heritage (Ash and Harrison 2025). Such discussions concerning museum collections, especially in countries like Aotearoa, are increasingly important for postcolonial discourses in our modern world (Gaimster 2020; Marlowe 2024; Ash and Harrison 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025). Investigating provenance furthermore allows us to reveal the links between artefacts such as ancient Greek and Roman coins and the people who collected them, unravelling and interpreting the entangled and complex threads that connect the histories and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world to the modern history of Aotearoa (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). For the case of the Auckland Museum, as discussed in the next section, the connections between ancient coins and other Mediterranean objects and returned soldiers is of obvious salience to an institution that also serves as Auckland’s official war memorial (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). Chris Ehrhardt’s work on ancient Greek and Roman coin collections therefore helps present-day scholars to identify where we ought to focus modern research into ancient Greek and Roman numismatic collections in Aotearoa, aligning with current discussions around Mediterranean collections across Australasian museums and universities and their significance for us here in the modern south Pacific (Richards and Minchin 2025).

The Auckland Museum holds a substantial and wide-ranging numismatic collection of approximately 30,000 individual objects from various historical and cultural contexts (Lewis and Emmitt 2025). The collection includes coins as well as other objects of numismatic and philatelic interest such as banknotes, trade tokens, stamps, and medals. The history of numismatics at the Auckland Museum is long, going back as far as the institution’s earliest foundations. Upon opening in 1852 under the auspices of merchant and trader John Alexander Smith, newspaper advertisements calling for public donations of items for the Museum’s collection explicitly signalled the institution’s early interest in coins and medals (Powell 1967). When the Museum issued its first annual report in 1868, three numismatic acquisitions were listed for that year: a collection of mostly silver coins and medals from J. H. Crawford, four copper coins from J. H. Kirby, and a single copper coin from C. Hime (Auckland Museum 1868).

From 1868 to 1979, the Museum’s annual reports list over 500 numismatic acquisitions that suggest thousands of individual objects entering the Museum’s collections over the course of more than a century (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). As well as the many evident modest donations of ten or fewer objects, the Auckland Museum received a small number of substantial numismatic collections from highly dedicated collectors. For example, a large collection of British coins was acquired in 1926 from H. R. Butcher, and another in 1932 from Moss Davis (Auckland Museum 1979–1980). Perhaps the largest and most valuable numismatic collection acquired by the Museum arrived in 1947, bequeathed by J. C. Entrican, containing a variety of modern and ancient specimens of coins and medals (Auckland Museum 1979–1980). From these annual report records we can observe that there has been a significant, widespread popular interest in numismatics among the people of Auckland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which contributed to a sporadic build-up of the Museum’s numismatic collection over this period (Sheppard-Larsen 2025).

The development of the Auckland Museum’s numismatic collection in this way is comparable to what we can observe at similar institutions throughout Australasia (Richards and Minchin 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025). Initial interest in collecting and donating coins, among many other kinds of objects, often came from Auckland’s wealthy and well-connected early settlers – people such as James Tannock Mackelvie and John Logan Campbell, for example, who donated coins early in the Museum’s history (Auckland Museum 1877–1878). This aligns with a certain taste for numismatics that was common among the Victorian colonial elite in the Australasian colonies, who used their collections of coins and medals as a way of exhibiting their formal education and their knowledge of and interest in European history and culture (Sheedy 2012, 2025). This continued in the twentieth century, as we see in the cases of the Butcher, Davis, and Entrican collections. However, veterans of the World Wars and other overseas conflicts, as well as their descendants, increasingly became an especially important demographic of numismatic donors. Such people naturally donated objects like military medals and regimental badges, but they are also an important source of the Auckland Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman coins and other kinds of Mediterranean antiquities (Ash and Harrison 2025; Lewis and Emmitt 2025; Sheppard-Larsen 2025).

Chris Ehrhardt’s interest in accessing the ancient Greek and Roman coins in the Auckland Museum began at least as early as 1977 when he first made a record of some of the coins on public display at the institution, though at this point he had not yet been granted admission to the coin room to view the specimens in storage (Ehrhardt 1977). From 1982, however, Ehrhardt was given access to the Auckland Museum’s entire collection of ancient coins (Ehrhardt 1991a), and so thenceforth he began working on identifying and cataloguing the collection sporadically over the next nine years (Ash and Harrison 2025). He received financial support for this work from a University of Otago research grant (Ehrhardt 1991b). In 1991, at the end of this long and arduous project, Ehrhardt had produced twelve unpublished catalogue and discussion documents of the ancient coin collection (Ehrhardt 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1991d, 1991e, 1991g, 1991h, 1991i, 1991j, 1991k, 1991l, 1991m), altogether listing a total of 271 Greek and 1014 Roman coins that he was able to see (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). His Roman catalogue consists of seven separate lists, with the first six describing the Auckland Museum’s ancient Roman coins from the Republic to Valentinian III, and the last one listing the 296 late Roman bronzes in the Constantinian hoard (Ehrhardt 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1991g, 1991j, 1991k, 1991m). Ehrhardt produced a short supplement to these lists containing descriptions for a further sixteen Roman coins which he had previously not been able to identify (Ehrhardt 1991l). The Greek coins that Ehrhardt identified are listed across three separate documents: one for the Auckland Museum’s Ptolemaic coins (Ehrhardt 1991i), one for the Greek coins of Roman Alexandria (Ehrhardt 1991e), and one for all other contexts (Ehrhardt 1991h). Ehrhardt was able to describe around 400 of these Greek and Roman coins on-site in Auckland and was permitted to have the rest temporarily transferred to the Otago Museum for him to identify there (Ehrhardt 1991a). To the best of his ability, Ehrhardt gave bibliographic references, some of which are now somewhat obsolete, as well as weights and measurements for all specimens aside from those on display at the Auckland Museum at the time.

Ehrhardt hoped to see his lists published as a catalogue in several instalments in the “Records of the Auckland Museum”. Although there were discussions about doing this, by the time his lists were completed Ehrhardt wondered if publication would really be feasible and worth the trouble, as he wrote in a letter to the Museum in 1995:

[…] Unfortunately, I don’t have any clear idea of the readership of the ‘Record’. It’s impossible to turn lists into a thrilling narrative, but it may help if I give background, explanations, translations and so on, but I don’t know how much. When I started about twelve years ago, expecting that the lists would appear fairly promptly, I put in quite a lot of background;³ when the chances of publication receded, the commentaries etc. shrank. […] It will, of course, need to be done in my spare time, which during term-time is very limited […]. A further problem is that in 1984 the second edition of Roman Imperial Coinage vol. I was published, which made the first (1923) edition obsolete; but it does not contain any concordance with the first edition. Ideally, I should re-do the Roman coins in Part I [Ehrhardt 1991a] from Augustus to Vitellius (31 B.C.–A.D. 69), but quite honestly, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. […] (Ehrhardt to Young 1995).

An unclear audience for the catalogue, considerable time constraints due to his full-time academic role, and the unappealing prospect of even more time-consuming work updating obsolete references, are all reasons that made the publication of Ehrhardt’s documents increasingly unlikely. Furthermore, only a few years after writing the above letter, Ehrhardt lost his position at the University of Otago, which appears to have definitively put to rest any chances of publication (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). It certainly appears that Ehrhardt was working on ancient numismatic collections in Aotearoa very much in isolation and with limited access to well-resourced libraries to support his work. For the next three decades, therefore, the full extent of the Auckland Museum’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins remained obscure to anyone lacking specific knowledge of the contents of the Auckland Museum’s archives and storage facilities.

Starting in late 2023, however, the situation began to change as the Auckland Museum brought renewed attention to its Greek and Roman coin collection. Between November 2023 and February 2024, this collection became the focus of a summer studentship undertaken by Alexandra Lewis, funded by a Sheldon Werner Summer Studentship with further support from the Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand. Lewis’ project reorganised the Auckland Museum’s ancient coin collection, establishing an up-to-date record of its contents – 1,457 objects in total – and bringing it into accordance with the Auckland Museum’s standards of best practice in storage and handling (Lewis and Emmitt 2025). As the ancient Greek and Roman coins are gradually digitised on the Auckland Museum’s Collections Online website, the best practice standards established by this reorganisation project are set to be carried over to the rest of the Auckland Museum’s wider numismatic collection (Lewis and Emmitt 2025). The ancient Greek and Roman collection was identified as the best place to start this process because, thanks to Ehrhardt’s initial work, it was left in an especially ready state for further development, with its specimens stored for the most part as he had found them, and with comprehensive, detailed lists of most of the coins which it comprises (Lewis and Emmitt 2025). Ehrhardt’s work therefore has a significant legacy not just for the Auckland Museum’s Greek and Roman coins, but for its entire numismatic collection and its future development.

Ehrhardt’s legacy also endures in the current research made possible by the Auckland Museum’s renewed development of its ancient Greek and Roman coin collection and its efforts at making it more widely accessible for study. These efforts have already borne fruit: Ash and Harrison (2025) have discussed the Auckland Museum’s ancient coins alongside the institution’s other Mediterranean collections, placing the collection as part of the growing discussions around the place and significance of these collections in the history of Australasian museums and culture (Richards and Minchin 2025). Likewise, a study has now been produced focusing on the collection’s provenance with particular attention paid to connections between coins in the collection and military veterans, including a revised comprehensive catalogue describing all 1,457 coins in the collection (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). The full extent of the collection includes a great variety of contexts and time periods: 314 Greek coins from across the ancient world from Spain to Afghanistan, 160 of which are Ptolemaic and Roman Alexandrian coins from Egypt; fourteen coins of the Roman Republic and 1,043 from the Roman Empire, 653 of which are late imperial issues from Diocletian to Valentinian III; and eight of which are bronzes of the Byzantine empire and the Umayyad caliphate. A further seventy-eight coins in the collection are modern imitations of ancient Greek and Roman issues (see Sheppard-Larsen 2025 for a full description of the collection).

With these contemporary conversations only just beginning to flourish, the Auckland Museum’s Greek and Roman coin collection will likely have a lot more to offer in furthering our understanding of the place that artefacts such as these coins have in the complex relationships that exist between the ancient Mediterranean, Europe, and modern Aotearoa (Sheppard-Larsen 2025). As a foundational figure in the ongoing history of the Auckland Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman coins, Ehrhardt’s legacy lives on as these small yet meaningful objects continue to inspire and inform us from the heart of Auckland’s leading heritage centre.

The ancient Greek and Roman coin collection in the Auckland Museum has benefited greatly from the expertise and hard work of Chris Ehrhardt, without a doubt one of the most significant figures in the study of Greek and Roman numismatics in Aotearoa. His impact as a major contributor to the history of the Auckland Museum’s numismatic collections goes even beyond his personal disciplinary expertise in ancient Greek and Roman coins. We can see Chris Ehrhardt’s legacy carried on in the new scholarship being produced on ancient coins and other Mediterranean artefacts and their provenances, but also in the Auckland Museum’s recent development of its extensive numismatic collection. In the ongoing developments to this and other comparable collections in Australasia, this paper records the legacy of Chris Ehrhardt’s work and further reminds us of the human ties that even small objects like ancient coins can carry, from antiquity to the present day and beyond.