Denarius imitations from Taman peninsula

There are currently two Taman imitations for sale:
CNG
https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=lot&sid=3831&lot=573
Heritage
https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=lot&sid=3801&lot=32180

CNG attributes the coin to "Goths". Heritage writes "Early Goths". Heritage cites my 2006 Celator article on the series as reference, plus the Soviet numismatist L. Kazamanova, 1961. I suspect that they have not consulted Kazamanova's article in Russian, but copied the reference from my article.

Anyway, neither CNG nor Heritage seem to have read my article either. If they had, they knew that these coins were not minted by "Goths" or "Early Goths". In Russian numismatics, these coins are frequently called "Taman imiations" "coins of the unknown people" and "Imitations of the type with walking Mars". These descriptions are admittedly not so exiting, but they are accurate.

The Taman Peninsula (East of the Crimean Peninsula), where these coins were produced in the 3rd and 4th century was not settled by Goths before the late 5th/6th century. Hence, who ever made these coins, were certainly no Goths.

 

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Thanks Tejas, for your insights. Things like these, about who was who, were not so clear to me. As I understood it, the Goths conquered the Crimea and the Taman peninsula during the reign of Traianus Decius in 250 AD, but probably I'm wrong about the Taman part of this. The Goths were ousted by the Huns in about 375 AD.

I used these two books, but I can't readily read one of them, Roman-Sarmatic denarii from the end of the 2nd to the middle of the 4th century AD by V.N. Klyeshchinov, so maybe you can tell me more about it.



And the other is by Russian scientist Andrei Sergeev. This is an excellent catalog, but I would value a critical assessment of this book very much. The book was published in 2012 in Moscow, but the author died in 1998.







'most scholars agree that they were issued by the Goths and related German tribes'.

So - most, but not all scholars obviously. Hope to learn more from you.

 

The phrase "most scholars agree ..." in academia is often short for "I think that is right, but I can't be bothered to look it up .."

V.N. Kleshchinov is the book (booklet) to go for. He links the coins to Roman garrisons on the Bosporous and Sarmatians who copied these coins (pp 6-8).

Kazamanova explicitly called the coin "Coins of the unknown people" not "Coins of the "Goths and related German tribes".

"Related German tribes" would be the Heruls. Yet, it is completely out of the question that the Heruls, who were more like warrior bands than a people, actually minted coins. Indeed, Heruls existed until around 570 and they never minted any coins.

In contradiction to Sergeev, the archaeological and historical timeline for Gothic migrations to the Taman goes like this:
1. The Goths who lived along the Dniepr river were "ousted" by the Huns in around 375. As a result Gothic groups moved westwards into south eastern Europe and southwards into the Crimean.
3. Archaeological cultural goods associated with the Goths (Chernyakhov Culture) become visible in the archaeological record of the Crimean in the 5th century.
4. Goths moved from the Crimean Peninsula to the Taman Peninsula in the late 5th or early 6th century.

In conclusion, of all the peoples who lived in and around the Taman Peninsula, we can safely exclude "Goths and related German tribes" as originators of these coins. I don't know if V.N. Kleshchinov's theory that Roman garrisons produced these coins, at least initially, is correct or not. However, I think it was probably such garrisons and military service at these garrisons which brought various Sarmatian peoples into contact with Roman coins.

This is not to say that the Goths didn't mint coins. Besides the numerous copies of Roman aureii, there are large numbers of copies of Roman denarii found in western Ukraine, Moldova and southeastern Poland, which were most likely produced by the Goths, who were the dominant people in the region at the time.

This is my latest purchase of such a probably early Gothic imitation. The coin was found in western Ukraine and I think it dates to the second half of the 3rd century. And of course, I love the eight-legged horse.

 

Eight legs. A beautiful coin.
Question. What technique was used to produce this coin?

 

@Tejas Yes, you showed this horse coin some weeks ago. I wonder if there's any literature about this type of coin. There probably are museum collections containing these.
Is it really an imitation? I can't think of an example for it. Maybe a contamination of some denarius (Gallienus?), not an antoninianus anyway, and a Provincial bronze. Are there more known with the same depiction?

 

Changing my description of this coin to "probably Sarmatian."


I love that eight-legged horse, @Tejas! The portrait style looks very tetrarchic which suggests a very late 3rd century or early 4th century origin. Borrowed from an argenteus?

A related coin:

And here are my notes on it. I'd be grateful for any corrections, @Tejas! In particular perhaps I'm overemphasizing the Sarmatian possibility here and should rather say Chernyakhov or Sarmatian-Gothic?

"Imitation of Antoninus Pius denarius. The style is similar to imitations found in relatively large numbers in the region of modern Ukraine and Moldova, which in the 2nd century and later corresponds to territory held by the Sarmatian tribe known as the Roxolani (closely related to the Alans, though they may have had an additional Slavic component to their confederation). Archaeologically, the coins are associated with the Chernyakhov culture, thought to be comprised of some mix of Sarmatian, Geto-Dacian, Gothic and Slavic populations.

"Anokhin indicates that imitations of Antonine emperors were produced until the 3rd century at least, demonstrated by (for example) a reverse die match between an imitation aureus of Maximian, and an imitation denarius of Antoninus Pius. The official seed coins may have come from accumulations of non-Roman peoples elsewhere, e.g. in Dacia, and the paucity of examples from the reign of Septimius Severus and rarity of imitations of later emperors may indicate an awareness of the silver content of the originals.

"The Roxolani and others in the area were conquered by the Huns in the mid 4th century."

I had previously thought of my Taman coin as my "Gothic" coin, and my A. Pi imitation as my "Sarmatian" coin. But it seems I may have this exactly backwards...

 

True, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe the coin is even later than I thougth, i.e. first half 4th century.
Thanks

 

I think the Roxolani are known only from one source. If I am not mistaken it is not even clear if this was a tribe or a royal clan/family. Usually, they are linked to the Alans (Rox-Alani = Roxolani). I doubt that there is any real evidence to link them with early Slavs.

 

The Chernyakhov culture was multi-ethnic and included various Sarmatians, such as Alans and Jazygians as well as Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Gepids. Unless we know the exact findspot of a coin, I think any ethnic attribution icomplete speculation. Since the Goths were the dominant ethnic group from about AD 250 onwards, I prefer to attribute imitations found in western Ukraine, Eastern Poland, Modavia and Romania to them. However, the Goths arrived on the Taman Peninsula way too late to be considered the originators of the Taman imitations (i.e. the "monety neizvestnogo naroda = the coins of the unknown people")


BTW the imitation of Antoninus Pius is wonderful and I think the attriution to "Sarmatians or Goths" is plausible.

 

I saw a very clear and convincing article about this type of coins - along your lines, @Tejas - in the vol. 2006, Nr. 7 issue of The Celator, it came up in a search for Taman on Academia.edu. But Academia is not free (although I think it's very much worth its price, you can find so many detailed numismatic articles on all sorts of subjects there) and Vcoins is - where you find all the issues of The Celator, and what a nice and interesting coin magazine was The Celator. See page 22-26, with good illustrations.

For myself, I translated the introduction of the Kleshchinov book, with a lot of help from Google Translate (that camera function is most helpful!) and a little from my Russian dictionary. Very interesting. By the way, Vladimir Kleshchinov was one of the editors of Sergeev's beautiful book about barbarous imitations from the whole of the Soviet Union (Sergeev died in 1998), that I mentioned above.

Kleshchinov shows some useful hypotheses: he thinks the coins were minted for payments in a part of the world where Sarmatians lived, among Roman-paid legionaries, and their dependents in the period from about 160-350 AD. So, the five more or less clear stages of these coins took almost 200 years to be produced. An eye-opener for me was the first stage: the recognizable imitations of Roman denarii, like this imitation of Marcus Aurelius, from the first page of the coins in Kleshchinov's little book.



That's a lot like this coin, that was reportedly found near Kursk at the Russia-Ukraine border, one of a large hoard of imitations and (worn) regular Roman coins.



Like you say, it depends much about where a coin was found - the Taman coinage must have been used locally in the first place. I hope to hear more about this line of coins.

 

Thanks so much for the detailed comments, @Tejas! It's great to have you on this board.

 

Thanks for that I have 40 or so of these coins, which I bought (very cheaply) in the Ukraine some 20 years ago. At the time, these coins were almost completely unknown in the West. So I decided to write the article in the Celator, which you mentioned above.

 

These denarius imitiations are usually very worn and they are often found as parts of hoards together with official Roman coins. It looks like these coins were used in bulk payments, i.e. payments were coins passed in bags according to size or weight.

The findspot Kursk is interesting and an important reason why these coins are often (in my view wrongly) attributed to Sarmatians rather than Goths. Hence, these coins often turn up in eastern Ukraine and Russia, i.e. regions outside Gothic settlement areas. However, this does not have to mean that they were produced there. For example, many medieval German coins (10./11. Cent.) turn up in Poland.

So my theory is this: The coins were produced by people that had contact with the Roman Empire and Roman coins - I think predominately the Goths (rather than Sarmatians). They needed these imitations to supplement payments to people further to the east, who had little or no contact with the Roman world. I guess that these coins were not used for small payments, but for bulk payments to purchase certain valuable commodities in the east and in economic terms they represent "balance of payment imbalances".

On these ethnic attributions: When we talk about Goths, we use a term that may have meant very little or nothing to the actual people at the time, who probably referred to themselves by such names as Greuthungi, Tervingi, Vesi, Tailfali etc.

 

I will try again...
How did they do it? Imitation as if towards the coins of the Taman Peninsula. Maybe some early version. You can see the figure of Mars on the reverse. But most interestingly it is as if it were part of some metal sheet. It looks like bronze.
The arrows show the straight end of the tile and a piece of another coin.

 

I recommend the TPZN forum and the thread about Germanic imitations. A lot of coins shown there are from my collection.

http://forum.tpzn.pl/index.php/topic,12355.225.html

 

Don't shy from the Polish language. From the TPZN forum, you may easily translate with Google Translate. This Divusric's contributions (dating from April, 20, 2020!) are very smart.

 

This is a very interesting imitation. I don't think it is a Taman imitation though. I guess that this coin was made by casting.

 

Here is an interesting article on denarius imitations:
https://www.academia.edu/41986098/The_CERES_Group_of_Barbarian_Imitations_of_Roman_Denarii?sm=a

The ethnic attribution suggested by the author on the basis of findspot evidence is that these coins were made by the Goths.

 

This is a very interesting article (by someone with a beautiful name! Arkadiusz Dymovski. I wish my parents had realised Arcadius is a fine first name).

It's a thorough and detailed piece about barbarous denarius imitations of Eastern Europe, that I haven't finished yet.

I decided to make pics and measures of all ten pieces I have. Of these ten, five are from a large mixed hoard of denarii and barbarous imitations found years ago near Kursk (in Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border), two are from Ukraine, and as for the others, it is not clear. Most I put a tentative Roman emperor's name on, but I'm not good at identifying reverses.



B1 Verus? 1.65 mm, 2.76 gr.



B 2 Marcus Aurelius? 16 mm, 2.75 gr.



B3 Septimius Severus 17 mm, 2.54 gr.



B4 Marcus Aurelius or Commodus caesar? 17 mm, 1.78 gr. (a bit broken)



B5 Marcus Aurelius 16.5 mm, 3.38 gr.



B6 Marcus Aurelius 17 mm, 2.80 gr.


B7 Faustina I, 18 mm, 3.06 gr.



B8 Marcus Aurelius 16.5 mm, 2.43 gr.



B9 Septimius Severus 16.5 mm, 2.62 gr.



B10 Caracalla caesar 17 mm, 2.73 gr.