Elizabeth Errington
Curator of South Asian Coins and Masson
Project
Coins of South and South-east Asia,
Afghanistan and the Masson Collection (Departments of Asia/Coins
and Medals)
Department: Coins and Medals
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7323 8139
Email: eerrington @ thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
Elizabeth Errington is responsible for the acquisition,
documentation, and care of the coins of all periods from
Afghanistan, South and South-east Asia. She joined the Museum as
key worker on the Masson Project in 1993 and was appointed curator
in 1995 to assist in the development of the HSBC Money
Gallery. She was previously an editor for Central
Asia/Afghanistan for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and
worked for the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge, on the 1992
Crossroads of Asia exhibition (Fitzwilliam Museum).
Her special numismatic interests are early
Indian punch-marked coins and the coinages of pre-Islamic
Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan. She has worked extensively on
19th-century archaeological records of Gandharan Buddhist sites and
is utilising this expertise to catalogue the vast range of coins,
relic deposits and small finds excavated and collected by Charles
Masson at Buddhist sites and the urban site of Begram in
Afghanistan in 1833-38. The Project is using Masson’s comprehensive
illustrated records (British Library) to identify and document his
finds in the British Museum, British Library, Victoria and Albert,
Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums. The ultimate aim is to organise
the material into an accessible study collection for research and
publication.
Current British Museum projects
Previous British Museum projects
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External fellowships/ honorary positions/ membership of professional bodies
Member of the Royal Numismatic Society
Publications
Most recent publications
E. Errington, From Persepolisto the
Punjab. Exploring the Past in
Iran, Afghanistanand
Pakistan, with V.S. Curtis (London, The British Museum
Press, 2007)
E. Errington, ‘“Boots”, “female idols” and
disembodied heads’, Journal of Inner Asian Art and
Archaeology, I (2006), pp. 89-96
E. Errington, ‘A survey of late
hoards of Indian punch-marked coins’, Numismatic Chronicle
(2003), pp. 69-121
E. Errington, ‘Charles Masson and Begram’,
Topoi, 11/1 (2001 [2003]), pp. 357-409
E. Errington, ‘Numismatic evidence for dating
the “Kanishka” reliquary’ (with appendix on the inscription by H.
Falk), Silk Road Art and Archaeology, 8 (2002), pp.
127-46