The David Sellwood Collection of Parthian Coins
(PART TWO)
David Grenville John Sellwood was born in Brentford, West London, in 1925. He
became interested in coins as a young child, when he was given a box containing some
Roman and other coins by his grandfather and began collecting coins as a teenager
during World War II, when his family moved from London to Wales, from where his
mother’s family came. Always intrepid in the pursuit of his enthusiasms, he cycled from
Welshpool to visit a coin dealer in Shrewsbury, a round trip of forty miles.
By the 1950s, his collecting had become more serious. He loved British history
and collected coins of all periods, but he was also fascinated by the coinage of
the Ancient World. A pragmatist, he began collecting Parthian coins because the
series was less well-known than the Greek and Roman series, and therefore more
affordable.
The Parthian issues fired his curiosity and inspired him to explore this field, culminating in his landmark publication
An Introduction to The Coinage of Parthia
in 1971, with a revised edition published in 1980. His insightful and incisive
approach to the coinage of Parthia was both pioneering and ground-breaking. To his contemporaries, David
Sellwood was the leading Parthian numismatist, and his collection represents a lifetime of critical research in the
subject to the highest academic standards. He also co-authored, with P. Whitting and R. Williams,
An
Introduction
to Sasanian Coins
in 1985.
David’s approach to coins united, in a way, the two aspects of his intellectual character: on the one hand the historian
and linguist and, on the other, the scientist. During his National Service, he served in the Royal Engineers in India,
Malaya, Singapore, and Japan, rising to the rank of Captain. He later took a degree in Mechanical Engineering at
Birmingham University, and went on to lecture in the same subject at Kingston Polytechnic (now University), gaining
an MSc in Metallurgy, and finally retiring as Principal Lecturer in 1995. This institution provided the venue for his
initial experiments in ancient mint technology. He made and engraved dies, cast blanks and struck his own series in
order to test ancient technology and better understand what he was observing in Parthian coins. Re-establishing the
technology and metallurgy of antiquity, he struck coins to the extinction of the dies, so defining the quantitative limits
of ancient coin production per die. He thus transformed a subject hitherto based on art historical studies into one
in which serious economic questions could be addressed. His ground-breaking approach underpinned his collecting,
which he continued to pursue until the last years of his life.
David participated actively in numismatics and was President of the Royal Numismatic Society from 1979 until
1984, and an Honorary Fellow from 2004. He was also, for many years, an enthusiastic member of the British
Numismatic Society. David Sellwood passed away on 7 April 2012.
Bibliography
Petrowicz, A R vov, “
Arsaciden Münzen
”, Vienna: the author (1904)
Sellwood, D G, “
An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia
”, 2
nd
ed., Spink & Son, London (1980)
Shore, F B, “
Parthian Coins and History. Ten Dragons Against Rome
”, CNG Inc, Quarryville, PA (1993)
Nelson, B R (ed.),
Numismatic Art of Persia. The Sunrise Collection
. Part I:
Ancient -650 BC to AD 650,
CNG Inc,
Lancaster, Pennsylvania and London, England (2011)
Consult the following works for the revised chronology and regnal years of the Parthian kings
Assar G R F, “A Revised Parthian Chronology of the Period 165-91 B.C.”,
Electrum
11 (2006), 87-158
Assar G R F, “A Revised Parthian Chronology of the Period 91-55 B.C.”,
Parthica
8 (2007/8), 55-104
Assar G R F, “Iran Under the Arsacids, 247 BC – AD 224/227”, in B R Nelson (ed.),
Numismatic Art of Persia. The
Sunrise Collection
. Part I:
Ancient -650 BC to AD 650,
CNG Inc, Lancaster, Pennsylvania and London, England
(2011), 113-171
