#denarii

Hundreds of 2,000-Year-Old Gold and Silver Coins Unearthed in Netherlands

Metal Detectorists in the Netherlands Stumbled Onto Hundreds of Looted Coins From the Roman Conquest of Britain.

The 404 coins, including 44 from Britain, are believed to be a mix of military pay and the spoils of war, stashed by a Roman soldier after he returned to the European continent.

As they swept over the muddy fields of Bunnik, a village in the Netherlands’ Utrecht Province that once marked the northern edge of the Roman Empire, in 2023, two metal detectorists unearthed a remarkably extensive and diverse haul of coins from the first century C.E.

There find—a collection of 404 gold and silver coins of Roman, British and North African origin—is the first of its kind unearthed on the European continent, according to a statement.

For Gert-Jan Messelaar and Reinier Koelink, the men with the metal detectors, the historic discovery came as something of an accident. They were combing the fields for a local fruit grower’s lost tractor key in Houten when they decided to give up and go over to a nearby field in Bunnik, where they had previously found a few coins, reports RTV Utrecht’s Bas Teunissen.

Koelink made the first find: a golden Celtic coin resting near the surface of the mud. The pair found a few more loose coins—including the largest Roman coin ever found in the province—but their metal detectors would not stop beeping. Messelaar finally stuck his hand into a shallow hole in the ground, where he uncovered a stash of hundreds of coins. “Bingo,” he recalls thinking, according to RTV Utrecht.

Koelink and Messelaar used clumps of mud to keep the coins together before bringing the haul back home, where they carefully cleaned, sorted and reported their findings to cultural heritage authorities. Then, they celebrated.

“We opened a bottle of champagne,” Messelaar tells the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey. “You never find this.”

Following the detectorists’ initial discovery of 381 coins in the summer of 2023, the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, with the help of Koelink and Messelaar, conducted additional excavations in the surrounding areas, finding another 23 coins.

Now, the grand total of 404 coins will now join a permanent exhibition titled “The Netherlands in Roman Times” at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

Dated to between 200 B.C.E. and 47 C.E., 360 of the coins are Roman in origin. Of these, 288 are denarii, the standard silver coin, and 72 are aurei, a denser, golden coin that was originally worth 25 denarii.

Many of the Roman coins bear the portrait of Emperor Claudius, who reigned between 41 and 54 C.E. One depicts Julius Caesar, while another even rarer coin shows the likeness of Juba, the ruler of Numidia, a kingdom in northern Africa that roughly corresponds to modern-day Algeria.

Two of the Claudius coins dated to between 46 and 47 C.E. are from identical dies, suggesting they were distributed to Roman soldiers as military pay, write Anton Cruysheer, an archaeologist with the Utrecht Landscape and Heritage Foundation, and Tessa de Groot, an archaeologist with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, for UtrechtAltijd.

The 44 non-Roman coins are perhaps the most notable of the entire stash. The golden alloy coins, known as staters, bear the inscription “CVNO,” the first four letters of Cunobelinus, the Latin name of Celtic King Cunobelin, who reigned between roughly 10 and 42 C.E. in southeastern Britain.

Cruysheer and de Groot argue that the eclectic composition of the hoard “strongly suggests a connection to the conquest of Britain” under Aulus Plautius, a Roman general who Claudius dispatched to cross the Channel and invade the island in 43 C.E.

The wide range of dates of the Cunobelin staters, including four posthumously issued coins, indicates that the stash was removed from circulation in one fell swoop, like Roman troops looting the newly conquered territory, according to UtrechtAltijd.

Combined with the Roman coins used as military pay, the entire stash strongly resembles spoils of war. Discovered less than a foot beneath the surface, where it was probably buried in a leather pouch that has since decayed, the cache was left in a region where Roman troops were known to have amassed before the invasion of Britain.

“This is the first time that physical evidence of the return of the troops has been found,” Cruysheer tells the Guardian. “Apparently, they came back with all sorts of things. That is new information.”

By Eli Wizevich.

WARWICKSHIRE Museum Service needs help to raise the funds to buy a major Roman hoard, found recently in Warwickshire.

The hoard made up of 440 silver denarii coins was uncovered during an archaeological dig at a Roman site on the Edge Hill in 2015. They were buried in a ceramic pot over 1,900 years ago, under the floor of a building. This is the second hoard of denarii to be found in this area and this new discovery contains 78 coins dating to AD 68-69, a turbulent time in Roman history known as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’.

As with all finds of gold or silver of this date, the hoard was declared Treasure and has been with the British Museum for formal identification and valuation. Warwickshire Museum now has four months to raise £62,000 to acquire the coins to display them at the Market Hall Museum in Warwick.

@merigreenleaf tagged me to.. find cool words i guess? Sounds like a plan. Thanks friend! 

For each MC in a WIP of your choice, pick out a cool word! Bonus points if you explain why

Cassius: Riven - Split with force or violence; divided. I chose this word because Cass sort of gets split between the faeries and the humans, his old personality and his PTSD and his fear, and it really divides him and causes a lot of conflict inside him. So i felt this was fitting, especially considering it was violence that caused all of it. 

Roman: Verisimilitude- the appearance or semblance of being real. I don’t really know why I picked this for Roman, not going to lie. I suppose, to Cassius, he barely feels real, since Cass doesn’t believe he deserves Roman’s attention and love. But That’s reaching. I guess it just fit. 

Amirian: Luminous - Shedding light in the darkness. Amirian provides hope for Roman, and peace from his pain. Without her magic, he’d be an entirely different character, and because of her, the couple is able to exist and be happy. So i’d say she’s pretty luminous. 

Denarii: Maleficium - dangerous, harmful magic. I feel like Denarii’s whole character is just full of dangerous, dark magic and while I don’t have much of her character figured out yet, this seems like the best word for her. 

The ruins of a 4th century AD Roman building which was burned down have been discovered right underneath the spot where a Roman coin hoard has recently been found in the roots of a tree. Photo: Video grab from BTA

The foundations of a large Ancient Roman building which may have been burned down during a barbarian invasion in the 4th century AD have been discovered in the town of Mezdra in…

To the people of Iron Age Scotland, silver was a new and exotic material, arriving with the Roman army in the 1st century AD. (Exploitation of local geological sources is not attested until more than a millennium later.) The first silver coins to reach Scotland’s shores came in army pay packets and only circulated within the military community, while occasionally Roman military sites like Newstead in the Scottish Borders have yielded prestigious pieces of silver jewellery.

Early Roman silver rarely made its way into local hands – finds that are known exceptions include silver rings from Culbin Sands in Moray, and a tiny votive strainer found at the Iron Age hillfort at Traprain Law in East Lothian – and these few items did not have a substantial impact on Iron Age Scotland. That was all about to change, though. Having tried and failed to conquer the area with force, the Roman Empire sought to secure its northern border using a potent mixture of power and persuasion. Once the Antonine Wall had been abandoned in the later 2nd century, gifts, bribes or payments – the terminology is loaded – were used to buy allies, create buffer zones, and interfere in local politics.

Roman Coin Hoard Found by Chance under Tree ‘Confirms’ Existence of Roman Town in Bulgaria’s Mezdra

This photo of the Roman coin hoard found in Bulgaria’s Mezdra was apparently taken immediately after its accidental discovery. Four-fifths of the pictured coins, however, have gone missing. Photo: Mezdra Municipality

A coin hoard of Ancient Roman silver coins, which has been discovered by accident in the roots of a large tree in the town of Mezdra in Northwest Bulgaria, according to…

Luke 10:25‭-‬37 CPDV