Society Chief Curator William E. Metcalf participated in a conference sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of the Arab Republic of Syria, the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria, and the Institut Français d'Archéologie du Proche-Orient held in Damascus on November 10 and 11. Metcalf spoke on "Rome to Antioch and Antioch to Rome," exploring the relationship between the two mints through their imperial history. The program included representatives of the museum and scholarly communities in Syria, as well as numismatists and historians from Belgium, France, Great Britain, Lebanon, and Poland. Also representing the United States was ANS President Arthur Houghton, who spoke on "The Production of Money by Mints in the Seleucid Core."

The program
The Syrian and French hosts extended themselves on behalf of their guests. The evening of November 9 included a reception at the Damascus home of IFAPO, the French institute for study of the ancient Near East. Nov. 10 and 11 included the papers, and on Nov. 12 the participants boarded a bus to tour the site of Bosra, in southeastern Syria. (Bosra is ancient Bostra, which has been widely accepted as the mint of Trajan's Arabian coinage since Dr. Metcalf's article in ANSMN 20 [1975].) The return trip included a stop in Sweida, which houses one of the most modern archaeological museums in Syria.

Prior to the conference Metcalf joined Andrew Burnett and his wife Susan Allix and François de Callataÿ and his wife Pascale in an archaeological tour that covered over 1000 miles in 6 days. Sites visited included Hama, Aleppo, Serjilla and the dead cities, Crac de Chevlaiers, Dura-Europus and Palmyra. For part of the tour they were also in the company of past ANS President Arthur Houghton and his wife Linda, who did their own tour by car. Burnett and de Callataÿ are both former visiting scholars at the Graduate Seminar (1982 and 1995 respectively), and the round table also included a presentation by Michel Amandry of Paris (1985); Olivier Picard, Visiting Scholar in 1999, chaired one of the sessions. Other participants included Frédérique Duyrat and Christian Augé of IFAPO; Olivier Callot of the Maison de l’Orient, Lyon; Bachir Zouhdi of the Museum of Damascus; Ziad Sawaya of the Lebanese Museum in Beirut; Kevin Butcher of the American University in Beirut; Aleksandra Krzyzanowska of Warsaw; Abdul Razak Zaqzouq of the Museum in Hama, and Maurice Sartre of the University of Toulouse.