Roman coins discovered in the waters of Sardinia | Hacker News Reader

Roman coins discovered in the waters of Sardinia

agenzianova.com

94 pointsmichelangelo75 comments

There were over a thousand Roman hoards discovered in Great Britain alone [1]. Given the scale of Roman mining operations, there are certainly many more out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_hoards_in_Great_...

And the uk has that interesting policy where I believe the govt owns any treasure you find. Is it that way in the EU? In the us I believe you own it if you find something, but we don't seem to have as much treasure sitting around everywhere.

Any developed European country will have very strict laws on the subject, typically ensuring the State gets ownership of the artefacts (occasionally in exchange for what it sees as "fair value" to the finder).

> we don't seem to have as much treasure sitting around

It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Native-American items that survived generations of nomadic life are definitely treasure, but they clearly weren't seen as such until relatively recently. And as soon as you step into Mexico you have a lot of traditional treasure from pre-Columbian civilizations.

> It depends on your definition of treasure, of course.

Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?

You'd be surprised. Mexico & Central America in particular were very well populated - Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan were among the largest cities in the world in their respected heydays, and the overall population of both Mexico and of the Andes + Amazonia were on par with European nations of the time.

(Ed. - Noting that the thread here was specifically about the US, those populations were also much larger than most are aware, and also had a fairly rich material and social culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest, though admittedly both smaller and unfortunately more biodegradable than the empires in the south. Book recs below still stand.)

If you're interested, Charles Mann's 1491 is a fantastic read on the pre-Colombian Americas - these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything also spends a lot of time with the various North American civilizations.

> these were large, sophisticated, well-established civilizations before smallpox.

I'm not arguing against that. It's just that their metallurgy industries were quite underdeveloped in comparison to those in Europe/Asia. Some types of artefacts etc. are just preserved better than others.

e.g. we have massive amounts of clay tablets left by the Hittites, the Ancient Assyrians, Babylonians etc. We have very few or almost no little texts written by (and know relatively overall about them in general) more 'advanced' and 'developed' civilizations like the Etruscans, Carthaginians or the Achaemenid Empire because they used more perishable materials for writing (or possible weren't really that into writing things down like the Persians).

Same applies to many other types of material culture. Neolithic Europe for instance was fairly densely populated and possibly quite advanced yet people lived in wooden houses (the climate is of course also much more humid) and didn't write stuff down (possibly due to their more egalitarian nature compared to middle eastern civilizations) and we barely know anything about them too. It's possible that one of the largest cities on earth during the 4th millennium BC were in what is now Ukraine yet we know almost absolutely nothing about them (they had ample supplies of wood, so there was no need to make houses out of mudbricks and due to whatever reasons they had no inclination to build massive tombs or temples)

Well, if you're interested in written materials in particular, the Maya and Aztec codices were in abundance at the time of the Spanish arrival, as were the Incan quipu (which seem to have been an actual writing system and not just an accounting method). They didn't survive contact - the Spanish burned as many of them as they could get their hands on, and today we've only really got a handful of extant examples left. That's unfortunately the answer for what happened to a lot of New World culture (although the climate and terrain deserves its due especially in Central America, where there's oral history of large cities which we're only now finding by lidar because the jungle's so aggressive).

The Olmec are an interesting case here, too - beautiful, just stunning sculptural works, going back to ~2000-1500BC. There's really quite a bit of cultural artifacts found and to be found.

I'm not really trying to downplay or deny the significance of pre-contact American cultures and civilizations. Everything I said was in the context of:

> It depends on your definition of treasure, of course. Wouldn't it still be a tiny fraction of what was/can be found in Europe no matter how you define it?

Which I think still holds true (again certain materials (especially in combination with certain climatic conditions) just survive for much longer than others).

There’s a definition of what constitutes “treasure” in the UK law described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996

I was not expecting to find terms that require finding a coroner.

In the UK (though the law is different in Scotland) it's called 'treasure trove' (though that's not legally correct, I gather) and is assessed by coroners, whose normal responsibility is certifying deaths and reporting on unusual circumstances of deaths.

https://www.gov.uk/treasure

rnk> the govt owns any treasure you find.

The King, well "the Crown", I guess the £millions we give them each year aren't enough. One of the vestiges of feudalism, he has an army and we (the UK) don't so we apparently abandon reason, and democracy, ... I digress.

See the recently updated Treasure Act, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/24.

Don't be daft. The king is not the crown. Treasure items found in the UK are compulsory purchased by the state, not taken by the king. It's not a bad system in terms of practical results.

Sounds like an excellent way to ensure that individuals who find valuable historical artifacts never report them to the authorities and possibly remelt them instead.

You can even melt it down with just a propane blow torch, so no exotic equipment required. For the finder, seems well worth the hit in historical value vs the risk of the government seizing it without adequate compensation.

why pay a fee to go into a museum and look at interesting old stuff? you'll never get adequate compensation for that cash!

people do have other values than simply the value of melting King Arthur's crown.

You get far more from the state as historical value than you would from the scrappy as bullion value. So, no, quite the opposite.

This is good info.

I assume you’re talking about finding things on private property since it’s illegal to take artifacts on public land in the US older than a certain age

I feel i entered a nightmare. I google XNUMX and it seems to be everywhere? What conspiracy is this? What is happening? What is XNUMX ?

> A rich deposit of follis dating back to the first half of the XNUMXth century AD was discovered in the sea of the north-eastern coast of Sardinia, in the territory of Arzachena.

Did they forget the variable $NUM? lol.

A site I found had this on the body content:

> The arithmetic mean of the numbers XNUMX XNUMX XNUMX XNUMX XNUMX XNUMX

> Answer is: XNUMX

Wow I thought the author just forgot to go back and replace these placeholders once they confirmed the right number but you're right, Google shows all kinds of articles across the internet referring to the XNUMXth century, what the heck?

https://www.google.com/search?q=xnumxth

I'm seeing indications that this is sometimes related to language translation using GTranslate.io [1]

> We use XNUMX variable instead of all numbers in our edit interface. For example "10 cents" in your original text is represented as "XNUMX cents" in the edit interface, so if you translate "XNUMX cents" once, the same translation will be used for all similar phrases like "11 cents", "18 cents", etc. This helps to do less work.

[1] https://docs.gtranslate.io/en/articles/1348921-how-to-edit-t...

That explanation tracks with the number of non-English results in this search: https://www.google.com/search?q=xnumx+-michigan&tbs=li:1 and the way XNUMX appears in these results.

(apologies. I only use google when I need to do a verbatim search)

Tokenization like this is why LLMs are also bad at math.

Seems to be related to wordpress and working with translations. Haven't been able to pin if it is wordpress core related, or specific plugins. When you find those results on google, all the sites I saw it on were using wordpress.

It seems like a missing placeholder?

There's one report of this for the Polylang plugin [0]

And another reference in another plugin's help docs [1]

[0] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/i-have-some-error-with-t...

[1] https://docs.gtranslate.io/en/articles/1348921-how-to-edit-t...

XNUMX looks like a placeholder for a number you'd find in a document where the actual number is supposed to be inserted later.

There might be a glitch or it's just a weird coincidence

It is a metasyntactic variable for FNORD [1]. You have stumbled on the core of the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, this is how they manipulate us all. Burn it I say, burn it with fire and spread the ashes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord

Anyone collect ancient coins?

I've always thought it would be interesting to own something that was created and handled by someone in ancient Rome or Greece or China.

My wife is 100% against the idea, though, because you don't know where they might have come from and (therefore) you could be supporting grave/site robbers.

(I wonder if a case like this, thousands of coins discovered -- maybe sell some to collectors -- and we can feel good that they haven't been stolen.)

I think in places like Italy they discover something of that sort almost every single time they dig a hole deep enough into the ground (eg during construction).

Same thing in France, Germany, UK and elsewhere, except the coins are unexploded ordnances.

Some decades ago, swimming in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast, I dived to pick up what at first very-nearsighted glance (not wearing my specs in the sea) could be an amphora. At the surface it was obvious that it was an unexploded shell, which I put down very carefully then swam far away.

Not sure about developing countries like Libya decades ago, but in places like France, Germany etc. there are well-developed procedures for dealing with this sort of thing, and you should definitely contact the police if you find something like this.

Related… I believe there are many discoveries still to be made beneath the foundations of historic buildings that are too revered to excavate. To do a thorough survey of these sites would amount to taking down the buildings that sit on them, and nobody’s touching those UNESCO-grade buildings, so the secrets beneath remain undisturbed in modern times.

Sometimes you can find a King under a parking lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_and_reburial_of_Ric...

I'm Italian, and my maternal grandfather was a "numismatist trader" (commerciante di numismatica). He made pretty good money in the '70s, when the field had a short-lived boom, but in short: don't ever do it for the money, the field is full of sharks that will happily part you from much-more-modern currency. Valuations are often pulled from thin air, even the most official-looking ones, and things that are supposed to be rare because of age (say, a Roman coin) end up being anything but - because they were coined in massive numbers.

As for supporting grave robbers: that's unlikely, unless you actually live in the Middle East (where the practice is still relatively easy to carry out). You can easily look at it in the opposite way: a lot of those countries will never have the interest or money to properly look after minor artefacts; so you might as well try to preserve things for them.

In terms of what to do with hoards like this one, it really depends on laws of the country - afaik in Italy they can't be sold to the public, they are automatically State property and that's it.

It's generally estimated that the vast majority of antiquities on the market are the product of illegal activity, though typically more less severe crimes than grave robbing. It's not a problem limited to the middle east, though looting is particularly severe there. I've seen it all over the US for example, a country with particularly strong antiquities laws.

People should avoid any antiquities that don't have clear provenance.

>People should avoid any antiquities that don't have clear provenance.

Stay clear of the British Museum ;o)

I do! I never imagined I’d say that but here I am.

I collect ancient Greek coins and Renaissance era books with an esoteric flair. I have a coin that was probably designed by a Pythagorean (based on imagery and dating) and several books by Marsilio Ficino. I also have several coins that appear to depict mushrooms :)

In the future, I’d really love to get into collecting manuscripts in India, because there are still so many rotting away in temple basements…

Wow, where do you source these things? I’m interested in similar!

Lovely! Which coin do you speak of? (And which ones have mushrooms on them?)

Pliny speaks of a place in Greece where the wine is so strong is has to be be diluted 20-1. Which makes no sense— wine can’t be that strong. I have a coin from there with a bunch of grapes that look very distinctly like a mushroom.

The Pythagorean coin has the tripod from the Oracle of Delphi on it, two snakes, was minted in Croton and dates to 510 BC. Pythagoras’s father was a gem engraver — so there is a possibility that the coin was designed by Pythagoras himself.

Magical!

What you're looking for is a coin with a documented provenance, basically that its modern history of ownership is known and traceable. The word used by numismatists is pedigree. Pedigreed Roman coins are widely available for relatively cheap prices ($100-$300) through reputable dealers.

The trouble is finding a "reputable" dealer and a trustable path of provenance. I've been looking around for a set of specific coins from the 6th Century. They show up in searches but range from $20-$500. You can't tell if you're getting the real thing or a knock-off. Few have an escrow mechanism so you don't know if you're throwing your money into the void.

So many of the websites raised red flags that I just stopped looking.

is the modern pedigree/provenance of value because you don't want to buy stolen coins? or is it faked coins? or something else?

I favor provenance, but my primary interest is ancient provenance.

Authenticity of course, but I find coinage of obscure satraps with brief reigns interesting just because they nail down a small geography and time period, as opposed to say an Alexander the Great coin which, who knows, there were a ton of them everywhere.

I don't personally collect, but as a (former?) archaeologist I have both some familiarity with the subject and a pretty strong distaste for looting. Provenance is just plain necessary for any sort of good academic work on historical artifacts.

Only time I've directly purchased coinage was for the purposes of melting down into a ring for my now-wife, and that had provenance paperwork just to ensure I wasn't enriching modern looters.

If not coins then how about relics? Everything that someone owned before us which was lost is below our feet and all one needs to do is study old maps to correlate the increased probability of finding one of those lost things from long ago. It happened by chance, almost 15 years ago now, that I learned something about the area in which I live that piqued my interest. As one who metal detects for exercise versus paying for a gym membership like many do, my chosen exercise pays me back quite well too if your area is significantly historic. ;) This leads me to inform those reading this far with interest that stone tools are everywhere and one just needs to know what to look for. Some of these stone tools date back over 10,000 years so if owning/holding a coin that is a 1000 years old is exciting, put yourself in my shoes when I discover and pick up a point (arrowhead) that dates back 5000 years. Now consider the last person to touch it before it was lost and how many people that relic fed. I have found hundreds of such relics and many old coins in the last 15 years, just yesterday I went for a walk and found 2 more points. My neighbors house is going up for sale in a few weeks for anyone that is extremely hard core in this hobby.

I'm sorry but your partner sounds like a pain in the. History is History, Go find yourself some ancient goods.

Why is grave robbing something that old immoral? Is it just the potential to ruin an archeological dig site or do we actually care about leaving these things untouched?

Even though it's generally pretty morally frowned upon, it's probably a high risk to damaging historical evidence that the pillagers may not consider "valuable" for resale in the process of finding things they do.

It's also pretty much destruction and hoarding/privatization of literal historical artifacts, art theft on a chronologically heart breaking scale.

Really we do largely want to touch those things. Just slowly and carefully and for the benefit of a larger volume of knowledge for the whole of humanity.

"It belongs in a museum" may have some good debate around it, but "it belongs on the free market for the highest bidder" is probably statistically less favored, I'd wager.

I do. I have a variety of Roman coins dating back to Principate up to the Byzantine era. I tend to look for coins for Emperors that I find interesting, such as Trajan, Constantine, Aurelian and others. It looks like most of the coins were Folles, which were a low denomination coin. These coins were pretty much worthless starting in the late 270's until the Empire stabilized in the 330's. The Romans devalued the coins so much and inflation became so bad that the Roman government abandoned using coinage and reverted to a payment in kind system for taxes. (I believe Gold Currency was not affected as much but was only held by the very wealthy) Constantine introduced a new gold coin (solidus) at the time, which became the standard around Europe until the 1100's or so.

If you want a Roman coin the safest way is to get one from the UK, where they have the PAS (portable antiquity scheme) in place for legal finds. You can definitely find a coin with a PAS number and be confident it isnt looted. There is really no other good way, though. Most digs don't sell the artifacts and coins don't come with documented find spots; at best you can buy very expensive ones that were published around 140 years ago for sale, but that isnt a guarantee that the coin wasn't originally acquired fully legally

How much are ancient coins actually worth

Depends on the age of the coin, where it was minted, the condition, the rarity of it, where/when it was found and what was found alongside it, plus the market at the time of sale.

As with most things, whatever someone is willing to pay. You can buy them at places like https://www.baldwin.co.uk/ancient-coins-for-sale/ancient-bri... (no connection to the site just what I found)

So a few hundred to a few thousand pounds.

From the XNUMXth century AD!

That's a lot of asses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin)

I see what you did there

Sardinia is a trove of Roman artifacts.

Most friends I know from the east coast have some roman vase or something in their house (and yes, it's illegal if they have found those in most recent times).

Essentially as scuba diving became popular 50/60 years ago locals started finding lots of stuff in the sea and many did not report those to the Ministry of Culture.

Also, another fun fact.

One of the most common scams I've seen in Rome area where I live by farmers is to buy roman artifacts on the black market (few coins or something else will do). Then they report the finding to the ministry, which then pays them for years to not work the field and they bring entire teams to search for more artifacts.

It's extremely sad, but there's like no way to prove it or report it.

> The finds were discovered by a private citizen who, during a dive, noticed some metallic remains at a shallow depth, not far from the coast. The following day the underwater archaeological unit of the Superintendency of archaeology, fine arts and landscape of Sassari and Nuoro together with the Carabinieri of the Unit for the protection of cultural heritage of Sardinia and the Underwater Carabinieri Unit of Sardinia carried out an initial reconnaissance in the stretch of sea concerned, with the collaboration of the diving unit of the Carabinieri of Cagliari and that of the Fire Brigade of Sassari, together with the State Police, the Financial Police and the Port Authorities.

How on Earth did it take one day for some random citizen to report something and then for like 50 institutions to all collaborate with each other to launch a gigantic coordinated effort? This is just insane. I'm absolutely calling BS.

Diver sees something and calls a museum. Museum sends down an archaeology diver next day who confirms that there's something there and then 48 other groups collectively take credit for political purposes.

Or maybe I'm just jaded...

I bet they figure they can balance the budget with a great find :)

Sardinia is small. All the pro drivers probably know each other. This sounds like a curiously exhaustive list of people that came to a beach party.

This is talked about peripherally in How Big Things Get Done.

If you are a construction crew in Great Britain, you have an archaeologist on staff. Someone who is already recognized by the governmental agencies responsible for the Heritage rules for that jurisdiction. So you have one on staff who can swoop in at the first pottery shard and expedite an extraction or declare a detour.

And if you are a construction company, you realize that you can find multiple sites in the same month on different projects. So you have every other archaeologist in your contact list on retainer, so you can get one in as backup.

Not quite the same situation here, but it shows that people who want to GSD have ways to do it when governments are involved.

Literally : money.

> XNUMXth

Someone forgot to go back and Find/Replace...

Meta: how did Sardinia end up with Italy but Corsica with France?

Something something Habsburgs?

Genoa gave it to France to pay for their debt apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles_(1768)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_conquest_of_Corsica

Summary: “in 1767, the Republic of Genoa, exhausted by forty years of fighting, decided to sell the island to France which, after its defeat in the Seven Years' War, was trying to reinforce its position in the Mediterranean. In 1768, with the Treaty of Versailles (1768), the Genoese republic ceded all its rights on the island.”

However, Corsica was already de facto independent from Genoa at this time, so France had to send troops to conquer it.

In general, there are lots of places in Europe where language and culture don’t align with state borders (for example: Austria and parts of Switzerland and Italy are German-speaking, but not part of Germany). The reason usually dates to the time before modern nation-states.

> The reason usually dates to the time before modern nation-states.

Also, the nation-state norm was largely aspirational when it arose (and now), and the attempts to realize it since have been as much about attempting to craft new national identities corresponding to states as to align states to pre-existing national identities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles_(1768)

Both were actually taken over by French nobility in the XVIII century; it just so happened that the owners of Sardegna ended up conquering the whole of Italy 100 years later, and rebranded themselves Italian.

The simplest answer is that they were both shuffled around by a wide range of greater powers, and when the world was settling upon modern nation-states, France had control over Corsica and Italy over Sardinia.

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