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<p>[QUOTE="Marsyas Mike, post: 3949383, member: 85693"]While researching the Byzantine bronzes that come my way, I kept coming across online references to the Byzantine shops at Sardis. Finally I bought the book, <i>The</i> <i>Byzantine Shops at Sardis</i> by J. Stephens Crawford.which is a handsome cloth-bound quarto from Harvard University Press (1990). Mine is ex-Carnegie Mellon Library in Pittsburgh and it was only about $3 on eBay. </p><p><br /></p><p>Here's the story - one day around 617 A.D., the shops at Sardis burnt down. There were a bunch of them, along a kind of portico against a large bath complex and a big Synagogue. From the findings, archaeologists think that the shops were a mixture of manufacturing (textiles, dyes mostly) and restaurant/taverns. Kind of like a cross between a US strip mall and small industrial park. </p><p><br /></p><p>Nobody knows why they burnt down - the Persians are a likely culprit. But here's the interesting part - the ruins were never investigated, and only partially built over. Which makes the shops at Sardis a kind of Pompeii in the East. And there were a lot of coins - all bronze. And no skeletons. Which means people were able to evacuate, partially, but left behind tools, lamps, scales, and over 1000 bronze coins (and one gold brooch stuck in a crack in a wall). Here's some text:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1040645[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Here is what got me really excited - a breakdown by percentages of just what coins were found - Hellenistic / Greek Imperial / LRB / Byzantine -</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1040646[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>For each shop, a full list of coins found is provided. Not fully attributed from a numismatic perspective, but with enough information you can tell what they were finding:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1040648[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I left a few thumbnails from the book below. My only real complaint is that although the book is extensively illustrated, no coin photos are included! Not a single lousy follis or LRB. </p><p><br /></p><p>What I took away from this is the idea that LRB extensively circulated as small change in the Byzantine era, hundreds of years after they were minted. Sort of as if they stopped minting pennies after the Indian Heads in 1909 and yet we were still using them to make change a hundred years later. This might also explain why the tiny "nummus" type coins from the time of Anastasius' reforms and later are so scarce - there might've been enough old LRBs that minting new tiny bronzes was not required. </p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, this is an elaborate ploy to post some new Byzantine Folles I recently got - that Heraclius is SB 836 (rather scarce - not in Wildwinds or labrum). These are the kind of coins they were digging up at Sardis:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1040658[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1040659[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1040660[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="Marsyas Mike, post: 3949383, member: 85693"]While researching the Byzantine bronzes that come my way, I kept coming across online references to the Byzantine shops at Sardis. Finally I bought the book, [I]The[/I] [I]Byzantine Shops at Sardis[/I] by J. Stephens Crawford.which is a handsome cloth-bound quarto from Harvard University Press (1990). Mine is ex-Carnegie Mellon Library in Pittsburgh and it was only about $3 on eBay. Here's the story - one day around 617 A.D., the shops at Sardis burnt down. There were a bunch of them, along a kind of portico against a large bath complex and a big Synagogue. From the findings, archaeologists think that the shops were a mixture of manufacturing (textiles, dyes mostly) and restaurant/taverns. Kind of like a cross between a US strip mall and small industrial park. Nobody knows why they burnt down - the Persians are a likely culprit. But here's the interesting part - the ruins were never investigated, and only partially built over. Which makes the shops at Sardis a kind of Pompeii in the East. And there were a lot of coins - all bronze. And no skeletons. Which means people were able to evacuate, partially, but left behind tools, lamps, scales, and over 1000 bronze coins (and one gold brooch stuck in a crack in a wall). Here's some text: [ATTACH=full]1040645[/ATTACH] Here is what got me really excited - a breakdown by percentages of just what coins were found - Hellenistic / Greek Imperial / LRB / Byzantine - [ATTACH=full]1040646[/ATTACH] For each shop, a full list of coins found is provided. Not fully attributed from a numismatic perspective, but with enough information you can tell what they were finding: [ATTACH=full]1040648[/ATTACH] I left a few thumbnails from the book below. My only real complaint is that although the book is extensively illustrated, no coin photos are included! Not a single lousy follis or LRB. What I took away from this is the idea that LRB extensively circulated as small change in the Byzantine era, hundreds of years after they were minted. Sort of as if they stopped minting pennies after the Indian Heads in 1909 and yet we were still using them to make change a hundred years later. This might also explain why the tiny "nummus" type coins from the time of Anastasius' reforms and later are so scarce - there might've been enough old LRBs that minting new tiny bronzes was not required. Finally, this is an elaborate ploy to post some new Byzantine Folles I recently got - that Heraclius is SB 836 (rather scarce - not in Wildwinds or labrum). These are the kind of coins they were digging up at Sardis: [ATTACH=full]1040658[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1040659[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1040660[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]
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