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The British School at Athens mourns the passing of numismatist Keith Rutter (1939-2024).

Keith Rutter is known to Members and friends of the School above all through the “Postgraduate Training School in Greek Numismatics” which he instigated and led. Keith taught it over two weeks with his student and colleague Simon Glenn (now at the British Museum) in the academic years 2011-12, 2013-14, 2015-16, 2017-18, after which it was interrupted by the pandemic, but then revived more recently. It provided students from the UK and other countries with a unique opportunity to be taught and handle ancient coins in their original settings.

Keith was professor emeritus in Classics at Edinburgh University, and a leading expert in classical Greek coinage. His publications are characterised by rigour and technical and organisational accomplishment, and also by breadth, delving as they did also into aspects of classical Greek historiography and culture. As a numismatist he is associated mostly with Italian coinage (Campanian Coinages 475-380 BC, 1979; with A. Burnett, Historia numorum: Italy, 2001), although he has also published on Greek coins in other areas, for example Athens.

Above all, Keith was widely liked and admired for his amiable and mild disposition, the great interest he took in the lives of others, and the wide range of interests -for example in languages, music, walking and travel- which connected him to people and places. He was absolutely devoted to his family, his wife of 55 years Wendy, and their daughter Catherine, and he is greatly missed by them, as he is by all who knew him.