Joseph Eckhel
Joseph Eckhel
Numismatist, born Enzesfeld, Lower Austria, 1737 ; died Vienna, Austria , 1798 . As a Jesuit he taught poetry and rhetoric in colleges of his Society, and also turned his attention to numismatics; and on the suppression of the Society of Jesus he became director of the imperial cabinet of ancient coins at Vienna. He published a catalogue of the collection (1779 ), for which he devised a new method of arrangement. By his “Doctrina nummorum veterum” (Science of Ancient Coins), published in eight volumes (1792-1798), he became the founder of the scientific numismatics of classical antiquity.