The tiny coins were deemed valuable due to the metal with which they were made. The coins were individual pieces of art, minted with hand-made stamps. On the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire, from the present day east Germany, through Poland, Ukraine and up to western Russia, denarii were used very commonly. The coins were silver plated or made of an alloy that was supposed to resemble silver." Kyrylo Myzgin is looking into the case told PAP: “It turned out that some of them are fake. Arkadiusz Dymowski, who together with Dr. The everyday shopper in Roman times would have a hard time telling the real money from the fake. Up until now, historians were convinced the coins came from the Empire itself. Hundreds thousands of silver Roman denarii have been found in the areas inhabited by Goths and Vandals in the beginning of this era. Thousands of coins dating back to the Roman era could be the work of First Century counterfeiters, it has been claimed.Īrcheologists from the University of Warsaw have been analysing the coins produced outside of the empire in today’s Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and have concluded that they are fake. All rights reserved.Archaeologists suspect, that up to one fourth of coins found in Poland could be fake, though it is hard to estimate the forgery’s scale. ™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. “For understanding the dying days of Roman power in the Province of Dacia, and the history of Romania, he is potentially more significant, but our results have just been published and the academic debate is just beginning.” He said that the researchers wanted to start a conversation with Roman historians and archaeologists to try and test their hypothesis about Sponsian. Pearson, however, insisted the researchers had reached “a clear-cut conclusion” about the authenticity of the coins, telling CNN in an email: “For the grand history of Rome, Sponsian is little more than a historical footnote – but a footnote that should nevertheless be reinstated!” “This whole theory - that the coin is genuine - is both unscientific and unfounded,” he added.ĭame Mary Beard, the acclaimed scholar of Ancient Rome and professor of classics at Cambridge University, wrote in a blog post published by the Times Literary Supplement that “there is still very powerful evidence that they are fakes,” going on to list a number of issues surrounding their crafting and design. “Like everyone in the numismatic world, I strongly believe this coin to be a modern forgery,” Jerome Mairat, curator of the Heberden Coin Room in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, told CNN. The researchers added that while “nothing can be known about him for certain,” the coins analyzed “provide clues as to his possible place in history.”ĭespite the study’s findings, some experts, including in the field of numismatics - the study or collection of currency - still believe the coin to be fake. The Sponsian coinage series was used to pay senior soldiers and officials, who kept them as a store of wealth, proposed the researchers.įrom the findings, it “would appear to be that Sponsian should be rehabilitated as a historical personage,” the study concluded. Sponsian never controlled an official mint or ruled Rome, said the researchers, but possibly became a local commander-in-chief who took charge during a period of chaos and civil war to protect the population of Dacia. The province of Dacia, which was cut off from the rest of the Roman empire in around 260 AD, was a region prized for its gold mines and mineral resources, according to UCL.
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