German language article about a hoard of aurei!

Wow!

 

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Amazing.

 

88 of them are unpublished, if I’m reading it correctly.

 

This hoard’s been known for a while. I got to feast my eyeballs on it.

 

Unfreakingreal!

 

That's why the article says it is the 25th anniversary of the discovery. Anyway, on 9 September the coins - in fact, the entire permanent exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Trier - can be visited free of charge. http://www.landesmuseum-trier.de/de/home/veranstaltungen/goldschatzjubilaeum.html

Christian

 

Is there no middle ground for displaying such coins? We have NGC slabs and museum heaps. Did they publish the individuals or just figure all that was needed was the carefully arranged heap?

 

In the museum’s gift shop, there is a book that catalogues each and every coin in the hoard. They also have some select specimens displayed individually.

 

Wiki article on the gold hoard.

 

Wonder how many of the hoard were whore'd?

 

With all the talk of soft, easily damaged gold coins we still see piles of them dumped onto a table, ready to riffle through your hands like Scrooge McDuck taking a bath in his money bin. I can't imagine linen gloved curators arranging such a pile coin by coin!

 

About 100 aurei have not been handed over to the authorities it is estimated. Curiously there are less coins of the rarer Emperors and types than would be statistically expected.

 

I've been asking myself exactly the same thing during a couple of recent museum visits. Opinions will vary depending on taste, but if you would like to get a good look at the single coins on exhibit, the "heap display" can be quite frustrating. At the same time, it seems to be fashionable among curators at the moment, probably because it looks more spectacular to most museum visitors than tidy rows of single coins.

Thus, I was positively surprised a couple of weeks ago when I was at the museum and excavation site of Empúries in Catalonia (the westernmost Greek colony discovered so far as well as the main Roman bridgehead in Iberia during the 2nd Punic War – very much worth a visit!) and saw how they display their hoard finds, for example, this small hoard of Republican denarii (ca. 74 BC):



A good obverse and reverse of each type of coin in the hoard is on single display and can be studied closely, while the rest is displayed in the type of aesthetically pleasing heap curators and museum visitors not interested in numismatics appear to like. To me, that seems like a good middle ground...

 

So that's where I left my pocket change. How do I go about contacting the German government to return my misplaced hoard of Aurei?

 

The hoard with pictures of all 2518 aurei is published in

https://www.amazon.de/Goldmünzensch...hrift-Geschichte-Nachbargebiete/dp/3923319827

 

The Brescello Hoard contained as many as 80,000 Roman gold coins, all struck between 46 and 38 b.c., and of only thirty-two varieties, said to have been found at Brescello in 1714. the latest dated coin being of the type Crawford 534


Supposedly a few of the coins were picked out and sold to collectors and the rest was melted down to make Ducats

 

That is spectacular. For some odd reason, I feel the urge to eat them.

 

Haha Counselor - I like your whimsical humor!

 

The Wikipedia article on the hoard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_Gold_Hoard

says, "An amateur archaeologist, Erich Eixner went back to the excavation site at night and found the larger part of the bronze cauldron, containing 560 coins and an additional lump of 1500 coins, using his metal detector. He informed the authorities of his discovery and received about 20,000 DM, a fraction of the estimated worth."

2000 gold aurei, some rare and many in nice shape, might be worth what, well upwards of $2,000,000 (at $1000 each, which is low)? In 1993 there was about 1.7 DM to the dollar, so 20,000 DM was about $12,000 at the time. So, the generous government gave the finder about 1/2 of 1 percent of their value. That is not a great incentive to turn them in.