The Hermitage numismatic collection contains antique tesserae exceeding 500 items, most of which made of lead. In the ancient world tesserae were used as money substitutes, which played the role of “admission tickets” for such public events as theatrical, circus performances, etc. and designated seats in the “auditorium” according to the figure shown on their faces. Under the imperial programme "Bread and circuses” in Ancient Rome tesserae performed oversight functions, which ranged from giving out free bread to theatrical and circus performances. Tesserae were also used in lieu of small change, when it was in short supply. They were used to pay bills in taverns or thermae, or to pay passage on board a ship cruising along the Tiber. The wages earned from working at the imperial and major private households were paid in tesserae, which were spent right there. Representing a variety of tesserae, spintriae were shaped as copper coin-like tokens which depicted erotic scenes and were used as tickets for lupanars, as brothels in Rome were called. The Hermitage collection possesses 12 spintriae. Contoniates constitute a special group of objects. It remains unclear what functions were served by those rare monuments, of which 15 items are kept in the Hermitage collection. It is conjectured that they could have been used as decorations or as commemorative tokens awarded to winners at sporting events.
The Hermitage collection possesses over 5 thousand tokens from Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany among which not only counting tokens, various types of gaming tokens are found, but also transportation, factory and city ones. In addition, the collection also contains toy tokens in the form of miniature coins, which made it possible for children not only to learn to count, but also to acquire the initial knowledge of the currency of other countries. Works by the renowned Nuremberg masters beginning with the 16th century – Schultes, Crawinkel, Laufer, Weidinger, Lauer and others – are well represented in the collection of German tokens. The collection items, which are in a fine state of preservation, were purchased as part of K.G. Timme’s collection in 1906 in Leipzig.
The Numismatic Department holds one of the largest collections of tokens – English privately produced units of currency from the 17th-early 19th centuries. Tokens representing a particular kind of coin-like objects used in place of official coinage were issued in order to make up for a shortage of small change mintage in England and her colonies. A total of over 1,5 thousand items (among which 985 are English tokens, while the others represent those from Canada, Australia and the USA) struck from copper and silver provide a comprehensive picture of this highly interesting phenomenon. The best part of the Hermitage tokens came from the collection of K.G. Timme, purchased in 1906, while a considerable part found their way into the Museum from Yu. B. Iversen.
A separate collection is made up of Russian private payment stamps consisting of 500 items. They comprise metal travel cards issued by shipping and railway companies, as well as club, restaurant, tavern stamps and others, bearing denominations on their face. A special section – around 100 items – is represented by “charcoal tokens” – coin-like currency units from the 18th and 19th centuries used as wages for the labour of peasants assigned to work at the steelworks in the Urals and Siberia.
