Kungliga Myntkabinettet

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kungliga Myntkabinettet - Sveriges ekonomiska museum (German: Royal Coin Cabinet ) is the Swedish museum of economics with a focus on coin and financial history.

The Royal Coin Cabinet is one of the oldest museums in Sweden , and some of its collections date back to the 1570s. The collections include over 600,000 objects. The museum is located in the historic old town Gamla Stan of Stockholm at Slottsbacken 6 right next to the Royal Palace in a magnificent historical property.

Royal Coin Cabinet

The museum includes the Lovisa Ulrika library with a large collection of specialist numismatic literature.

Organizationally, the Kungliga Myntkabinettet belongs to the state authority Statens historiska museer .

exhibition

The following collections are shown in the publicly accessible exhibition:

All the money in the world

The Money of the world collection shows coins from 2500 years of coin history, but also the earliest and alternative means of payment such as mussel shells , snails , pearls , precious metal pieces , stone axes , cocoa , salt and stone money as well as banknotes and modern means of payment such as credit cards . Also noteworthy is a collection of inflation money from the Weimar Republic , emergency money from this period, storage money from POW camps from World War I and World War II , occupation money and storage money from concentration camps .

The museum also shows a copy of the world's oldest coinage, the ⅓ stater , which dates from around 625 BC. In Lydia (today western Turkey) from electron , a gold-colored natural alloy of gold and silver found there as nuggets . (The stater (standard) was the monthly wage of a soldier.) The coin shows a lion's head as a symbol of the ruling house there. The last king of the ruling house, King Croesus , famous for his wealth in antiquity , who lived in 524 BC. Was defeated by the Persians, was the first to have coins minted from pure gold and pure silver . A coin is also shown by him.

Swedish coins

The Royal Coin Cabinet has the most complete collection of Swedish coins, including the oldest, and shows the 1000-year history of Swedish coinage from King Olof Skötkonung , who in the late 10th century , more precisely around 995, had the first Swedish coins, silver pennies , minted based on the English model. to today's King Carl XVI. Gustaf . From King Gustav I. Vasa z. For example, coins are shown that show him as a young man with a well-groomed short beard, as well as coins that show him as an old man with thin hair and a long beard.

Plate coins

The severe shortage of gold and silver when producing copper in-house led to the minting of kilo-heavy copper coins in Sweden in 1644 and 1768 in order to be able to pay large sums of money without having to mint hundreds of coins and count them when used. The Münzkabinett has dedicated a separate exhibition area to this numismatic peculiarity of plate coins (Swedish; Plåtmynt). At that time, rectangular copper plates were produced and then the initials of the ruler and the year of mint were stamped on the four corners and the value in the unit silver thaler , the name of the mint master and partly the place of origin of the copper, partly the place of mint. The copper plate coins were minted in the denominations of half a thaler, one thaler, two thaler, four thaler, eight thaler and ten thaler. The plate coin from 1644 shown in the exhibition, valued at ten silver thalers, weighs 19.7 kg and is the heaviest coin in the world. It was salvaged in 1974 from a ship that sank in the Gryt Archipelago near Östergötland in 1646 .

The magic of treasures

Through the sea ​​trade of the ancestors of today's Swedes, coins came into the country from Roman times to the Middle Ages, and the Viking raids brought gold and silver coins to Sweden. Such treasures have been hidden again and again and often only rediscovered in modern times. In addition to the Historical Museum , the Royal Coin Cabinet also exhibits a number of such hoard finds .

Save up

A historic savings bank and a colorful collection of money boxes are on display on the subject of saving .

Entrepreneurship

With the help of display boards and objects, the museum introduces important Swedish inventors , insofar as their inventions advanced Sweden's economic development, as well as great entrepreneurs . Among the 150 presented personalities are z. B. Estrid Ericson , Ingvar Kamprad and Niklas Zendström .

Medals

In Sweden, the art of honoring events with appropriate medals is particularly valued and has been cultivated for a long time. The Münzkabinett exhibits an extremely extensive collection of historical and modern medals.

The origin of the medals in Italy in the 15th century is portrayed as well as the first Swedish medals in the 1560s. You can also see the first Swedish medal, which was made in 1560 for the funeral of Gustav I. Wasa.

The medal as a precise small sculpture was used as a form of expression by many Swedish artists, including Erik Lindberg , Carl Eldh , Carl Miller and Bror Hjorth . The works of Lea Ahlborn from the 19th century are also on display . As a coin and medal engraver at the Royal Mint, she was the first woman in the Swedish civil service.

There are also examples of the most famous Swedish medals, the Nobel Prize medals , as well as numerous works by modern artists.

Personalities

Eva Ramberg has been the head of the Royal Coin Cabinet since 2012 .

The museum was long run by the Swedish archaeologist and numismatist Brita Malmer .

literature

to the Lovisa Ulrika library:

  • Kristina Kvastad: Dolt i kabinett. Lovisa Ulrikas mynt- och medaljskåp från Drottningholm. Utgiven av Kungl. Myntkabinett 2004.
  • Clas-Ove Strandberg: The Queen Lovisa Ulrika Collection of Numismatic Literature. An Illustrated and Annotated Catalog. Utgiven av Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Academies 2001.
  • Ernst Nathorst-Böös & Ian Wiséhn: Numismatiska forskare och myntsamlare i Sverige fram till 1830-talet. Numismatiska Meddelanden XXXVI. Utgiven av Svenska Numismatiska. Föreningen 1987

Web links

Commons : Kungliga Myntkabinettet  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Videos: in Swedish:

(all videos start with the same 50 sec panoramic view in front of the museum entrance)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.myntkabinettet.se/english ; accessed on December 30, 2015
  2. ↑ Kungl. Myntkabinettet: Drottning Lovisa Ulrikas eleganta boksamling i Kungl. Myntkabinettet PDF file; accessed on December 30, 2015
  3. ↑ http://www.shmm.se/ ; accessed on December 30, 2015
  4. ↑ The Royal Coin Cabinet: A brief introduction to the exhibitions (German-language short guide, as it was distributed to visitors in summer 2015) and The Royal Coin Cabinet: The Museums hidden Treasures (English-language brochure, also as of August 2015)
  5. ↑ http://www.myntkabinettet.se/om_museet/historik , accessed on December 30, 2015

Coordinates: 59 ° 19 ′ 33.3 "  N , 18 ° 4 ′ 24.2"  E