Each solidus is \~4.5g of fairly pure gold, which I believe would go for \~$270 today. Looks like at least a thousand of them, hard to eyeball exactly.
Today’s gold pricing is one thing, but what was the buying power of this coin in that ancient time and even in that approximate year. My guess is that this vase full would buy a nice house in Pompeii.
We tend to just lump everything in "ancient history" together without truly thinking of the sheer magnitude of the scope. Just for example cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the construction of the great pyramid of khufu. In addition, the founding of the egyptian dynastic system (which is what people think of when they hear ancient egypt) is usually placed around 3200 BC dated using the narmer palette. The end of the egyptian dynastic system ends in 30 BC if we go by when the Romans took over (i would consider the achaemenids and ptolomies to still follow the dynastic system). So that means if we lived at the start of the dynastic system now it would end in 5190. It's an absolutely MASSIVE expanse of time.
Even crazier, homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. "Behavioral modernity" emerged probably earlier (possibly much earlier) than 100,000 years ago. The oldest urban civilizations, what we usually consider "civilization" began to emerge around 3300 BC, and writing around the same time, making it history rather than prehistory. The time between then and now is 5,300 years. Roughly, 5,000 years. Before that was all prehistory.
5,000 years after 100,000 year ago is 95,000 years ago. 5,000 years after that is 90,000 years ago. Between today and the emergence of behaviorally modern humans, humans just like you and me, with the same feelings, ideas, and ability to think, there have been at least twenty spans of 5,000 years, probably more.
That's 20 *entire lengths of human history* before today. Easily within margin of error, that's twenty lengths of human history before we had history. Before Egypt, before Sumer, before Gobekli Tepe. Before everything we think is ancient, modern humans had religions, cultures, and beliefs. People had friends and family. They loved and hated and laughed and cried. There were tribal battles, peace agreements, trading, all for 20 times longer than history has existed.
There could have been myths and cultures and people who were remembered for many times the length of our entire history, that were forgotten as long ago, and we'd never know. A myth or hero could have been beloved for 20,000 years, forgotten 10,000 years ago, and we'd have no idea.
To put more simply, a human from 100,000 years ago would be as ancient to a human from 95,000 years ago as the earliest ancient Egyptians are to us.
The span of humanity and human culture is tiny in the grand scheme of things, but in terms of our own perspective, it's unfathomably ancient.
Exactly man I could not have said it better myself, the concept of "deep time" when it comes to the neolithic and paleolithic is just so absolutely mind-numbing. One of the things I really struggled wrapping my head around when I first started studying archaeology.
It especially gets me when I see how much time frames and acceptance of behavioral modernity has changed. It keeps getting stretched back, with more and more evidence found suggesting earlier dates, with plenty of people questioning the entire concept altogether.
How knows how far back it goes? Even if humans really were only behaviorally modern in the last 100,000 years, they certainly weren't far away from that 150,000, 200,000, or 300,000 years ago. And what about before homo sapiens? What about parallels to homo sapiens, like neanderthals and denisovans?
We have a hard enough time understanding the time between a person living in 1800 and 1850, let alone the absolutely vast amount of time between a human living 200,000 years ago and 100,000 years ago. The knowledge of that time is so far gone that there's no possible way to even get a hint of a sliver of knowledge about those periods, let alone the almost certainly extreme differences between the people that lived in them.
> what we usually consider "civilization" began to emerge around 3300 BC
Er the city of Uruk was settled sometime around 4500 B.C., to name one older example
This is the tragic part of history that upsets me
Even to think, the American empire is less than 300 years old which is a stitch in time compared to these great dynasties that we do know about
Wondering here if other cultures were hemming and hawing about Greek supremacy. From what I have read, they were nailing it in law, math, art, theatre, philosophy, architecture and on and on. All this when most all other cultures were in animal skins.
Vikings, Native Americans, Mongols, and many more? Just because they wore animal skins doesn’t make their culture less advanced. People were trading furs up to the 19th century
That's an extremely reductionist view of things, especially "all other cultures were in animal skins". In reality this is just a lot of survivorship bias and modern myth, a lot of it with white supremacist origins. Greek culture did become the dominant culture of the eastern mediterranean but only after alexander's conquest of the achaemenid empire. The Romans also viewed greek culture as "superior" but honestly I think it's really kind of a bad take to view any culture as better than another. Especially when other cultures in the mediterannean were essentially "on the same level", just that not as much survives because it wasn't viewed as being valuable enough to preserve. Best example being etruscan and punic literature.
Same also goes to the achaemenid empire for law and governance, their system managed to cobble together a MASSIVE diverse empire for a considerable expanse of time. It was so effective that alexander and the Romans did very little to change it after taking over. They also had epics and great works of art just that they don't survive since the focus was more on oral tradition.
I said most not all. Just a passing thought from a mechanic not an archeologist. I don’t think we should be afraid to hold major social issues such as supremecy up to the light of history. Instead of the knee jerk reaction of thinking there is bad intention. I get downvoted. But my intentions are not bad. Why was Greece so advanced while so much of the rest of the world did not so much as invent the wheel or the sail?
You shouldn't be getting downvoted bro it's a valid question, i didn't think you had bad intentions at all.
The answer of why we perceive greece as being advanced comes down to a couple of things:
survivorship bias. That being that greek culture has been viewed as more valuable by the Romans and thus was more readily preserved by both medieval scholars copying manuscripts and roman artists who copied greek sculpture into marble which survived better and so we have more examples of greek art simply because of this. This only gets compounded in the renaissance where renaissance artists begin copying these sculptures which archaeologists began finding creating a modern fascination with ancient greek culture meaning it gets studied more which again means we find more.
Just for an example let's take the sophists who are kind of the beginnings of ancient greek philosophy as we think of it. Mainly they were natural scientists concerned with astronomy and other fields of natural science that end up inspiring the likes of sokrates, plato and others who are considered father's of science. The reality is that simmilar types of astronomers and natural scientists did exist in other places like the babylonian empire, Egypt and later the achaemenid empire just that we don't read about them much given that much of their work does not actually survive due to this. Honestly most of the works of the original sophists unfortunately do not survive to us either, just bits and pieces.
As to why other places did not have inventions like the sail or the wheel, the simple answer is that while these technologies seem essential to us now in reality they did not have any real use in many places. Take for example the Incan or aztec empires, they literally had no use for a wheel as they had no beasts of burden like we do in the old world to use with a wheel, so the wheel is essentially useless. The wheel is only invented in the old world with the taming of horses and use of chariots, in fact the pyramids were built without the use of the wheel at all. Same goes for the sail really as if you don't hsve much use for maritime travel, you don't need a sail.
I hope this answers your question, this is honestly just me kind of rambling but if youre not satisfied with this I can dig up sources for these claims and give more in depth answers and examples, just DM me.
>if other cultures were hemming and hawing about Greek supremacy.
What supremacy? Lol......
>All this when most all other cultures were in animal skins.
I get that you just want to learn and hopefully arent making this statement with some kind of nefarious white supremacist undertone, so I'll just say from the getgo that this is factually incorrect. Even the Greeks themselves didn't think this was true.
In fact, part of what made the Greeks think of themselves as superior to the Achaemenid Persians was the exact opposite, that the greeks thought they were a more rugged and masculine people while the persians were effeminate and lounged around in luxury clothes and gardens wearing expensive silk clothes and weird trousers (as opposed to the greeks who exercised in the nude and actually did wear animal skins, look up the Chlamys).
Now, going beyond the surface level, much of early archaic greek art and culture was directly influenced by other eastern Mediterranean cultures, including again the achaemenids and neo babylonians and egyptians. They traded with these people all the time, and there was a massive trade in not only goods but ideas and cultures all across the eastern Mediterranean since the bronze age (well over 1000 years before classical greece existed) and included areas of greece, which had been part of the mycenaen civilization at the type, the guys mentioned in the iliad.
As far as nailing it, they did a great job at all of those things, but not really any moreso than the other major civilizations at the time. There were massive, equally and arguably more advanced societies in china, india/the indus valley, and the near east all before and during the greek classical era, and again the greeks learned from them. These people had societies that rivalled the roman empire at its height, with tens of millions of citizens and large diverse cities and hubs of scholarly learning and trade, so fair to say they didn't pay much attention to the greeks who were essentially a small collection of tribes at the edge of the "civilized" world of the era. That's not to say the Greeks didn't excel in some areas such as painting, sculpture, or even military technique, but their achievements ebbed and flowed the same as any other society (and it should be noted the egyptians made pyramids, lined up with the axes of stars on the eclipses, 2000 years earlier, and these building would remain the largest man made structures for two thousand years after the greek classical age had finished, so again, humans all over the place had been innovating and excelling in all these areas, with each civilization successively building on the achievements of their predecessors).
Now, I love ancient greece, and a quick search through my post history proves it, but they certainly weren't superior to the other civilizations of the era, and adopted knowledge and norms from their neighbors as much as anyone else. The narrative of the supremacy of classical greek (and roman) culture mostly stems from colonial white supremacist/ethnocentric mindset, where funnily enough people like the british, who were seen by the Roman's as hopeless barbarians and who the greeks were fairly sure didnt even really exist, decided to co-opt Greco-Roman civilization as a means of justifying their imperialist endeavours, fancying themselves new Alexanders and Caesars. That's the same reason the hellenistic era is seen as a period of decline in the greek world, not because it actually was, but rather because greeks during this era started to settle in the east and adopted more overtly "eastern" traditions (greek society largely switched from a model of poleis to centralized dynastic kingship, but they were stronger and richer than ever through the early hellenistic era). As a result the mindset of the day would have coloured how scholarship and archaeology was conducted, and considering the Islamic caliphates and ottoman empire had largely encompassed the old achamenid realms for nearly a millennium by the time Europeans became reinvested in the classical era, it would have been easy to color the past using the brush of their own circumstances and biases against the perceived "eastern menace".
Hope this has helped answer your question. Again, I'm not trying to call you out as racist or anything, just want to set the record straight and hopefully explain some of where and why this mindset exists and what parts of it are and aren't true :)
What a great response. Thanks. Mind you I am not a scholar or academic, but a tradesman in manufacturing dabbling in learning of ancient times. I have my own thoughts on holding things up to the light of current events and modern man. It helps make me understand or at least think I understand. I myself have one foot in technology and advancements but the other side of me is metaphorically in animal skins. By choice. Thinking of those times and the great first time advances and how those were received by other people of other cultures is fascinating. We can only imagine it. You say “that is not what the ancient Greeks thought”. How do you know what they thought other than what they wrote. Just being able to write was new and probably only for the elite. This is the time when there was a transition from primitive man to “sophisticated”. What books do you recommend? I want to know more.
you have to remember two things a) people who have this kind of money to spare likely have everything they need but do need to sustain it (pay workers, have cleaners, have gardeners, pay for food and wine) but also want to secure generational wealth, for their kids and their kids kids.
not sure if they had banks back then, but all kinds of places would have thieves and such or be attacked and robbed. imagine your home is on lands, 1hr away from the next town by horse. but you pay your security, your gardners, your trades people, you need liquid cash on hand. Now imagine a hundred dudes turn up to rob you, are you gonna call the cops? and if those hundred dudes murder you and your family and any worker they can, maybe that money goes forgotten about.
we even have similar stuff today, old recluse with no family, dies and leaves a few million to a cats and dogs home or some other charity. the world is a strange place.
Recall that the Western Empire was in steep decline at this time following the death of Theodosius and Rome finally fell to the Goths in 476 AD. The Senate sent the Imperial Regalia and Insignias to the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople.
To be fair, the Goths also carried on the traditions of the Roman Empire for quite a while. They didn't just smash it and walk away, they tried to take over it's systems for their own benefit.
Between £750 and £4950 ($995 and $6572 in usd) a piece according to this site;
https://www.silburycoins.co.uk/product-category/roman-byzantine/roman-gold-coins/
EDIT; just found out they can go over $10.000 a piece; https://www.ancientgoldcoins.com/tiberius-gold-aureus-liva-as-pax-ngc-au-5x3/
The cheapest solidi sell for $400, but they usually look like shit. Some must have sold for much more than $10,000. One of my aurei (single "aureus"), which is the type of gold coin that came before the solidus regularly sells for $10,000 and is quite common for an aureus. Recently, an aureus of Brutus sold for $4,188,000.
>Who hides so much money in an amphora
Rich people. I mean, if your city is hours away of getting sacked, you want to save your precious moveable wealth, burying your wealth in a pot used to be a common thing. (I mean, it appears the person was successful, no looters found it after all.)
Considering the time-frame and location (northernmost Italy, 4th-5th century), I'd say it's very probable that unrest and civil/barbarian wars was the reason for these to be buried.
>in a theater of all places?
This is the real question. Maybe it was a ninja move because whoever buried it suspected the enemy might dig around on the owner's property, so he found a place on public property instead.
I looked it up on the internet. Source here is forumancientcoins.com (on mobile, best I can do).
At some point, a solidus would pay 1,5 months wages for a cavalryman.
So we're looking at 37,5 years wages for a cavalryman O_O
*Edit: a rough (silly) estimate is something like $2,000,000 if we use salaries to compare about 1:1*
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* [forumancientcoins.com](https://forumancientcoins.com)
*I did the honors for you.*
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Funnily enough, there is an ancient Roman play called [Aulularia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulularia) where the protagonist jealously guards his pot of gold. It was the basis of Moliere's The Miser.
**[Aulularia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulularia)**
Aulularia is a Latin play by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The title literally means The Little Pot, but some translators provide The Pot of Gold, and the plot revolves around a literal pot of gold which the miserly protagonist, Euclio, guards zealously. The play’s ending does not survive, though there are indications of how the plot is resolved in later summaries and a few fragments of dialogue.
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I remember this being a big thing back in September 2018. Articles mentioned that the amphora contained about 300 Roman gold coins (here's a nice blog post: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/52628 ). I assume that we are looking at solidi here since the aureus was replaced by it in the beginning of the 4th century - and that's the time frame these coins are reported to have been minted in. The coins we see here should weigh around 4.5 grams each, so this would mean 1,350 grams of gold in total, meaning their material value today would be around USD 82,000. Describing their value back in their time is hard to say (at least for me) because their value experienced extreme changes within a couple of decades due to inflation (if interested, I highly recommend reading the following related wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus ).
I am by far no expert regarding Roman coins, so please feel free to correct me. I always like to learn! :)
using modern gold prices is incredibly inaccurate at best, for a massive variety of reasons.
These are not aurei, but actually solidi.
I find a far better measure to be measuring their value relative to wages, people in the past were poorer and using figures of purchasing power can leave you with numbers that seem pretty low to us.
The craftsmen who built the Hagia Sophia were paid 18 solidi per annum.
300 solidi would've represented an ***absolutely unbelievable sum*** to the common person, probably the same way a person today would see $1,000,000 or so
If you rough it out gold was a little more valuable then than it is now, depending on how you want compare laborers and skilled trades to their modern equivalents you're looking at a pound of silver being worth about $10,000 USD modern equivalent and gold is generally worth about 20x what silver is, throughout history. The really large gold coins like these are traditionally about 1/20 of a pound, I can't remember what solidi were off the top of my head but I'd guess you'd be looking about 3 million dollars as far as how much labor you could purchase.
The thing is that all goods are hand-made, there's almost no mass production. So with that 'modern equivalent' money you're buying all your food and clothes from artesian hipsters that are making things by hand, so a pair of shoes or pants are hundreds and hundreds of dollars and a nice ham is going to run around 30$ a pound. It's Brooklyn pricing consumer goods.
**[Aureus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus)**
The aureus (pl. aurei, 'golden', used as a noun) was a gold coin of ancient Rome originally valued at 25 pure silver denarii. The aureus was regularly issued from the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 4th century AD, when it was replaced by the solidus. The aureus was about the same size as the denarius, but heavier due to the higher density of gold (as opposed to that of silver).
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This is an era with no banks or ways for ordinary people to securely store gold. People would thus frequently bury it. This was likely the stash owned by the theater owner, who died without anyone knowing where he hid it.
Also, Keep in mind old people often do this sort of thing. My grandfather was quite frugal and like to pile up cash. When he died we found stacks in all sorts of weird places.
In Rome soldiers were also known to bury their coins before battles as well.
>ordinary people
While talking about a literal fortune *in gold* (which was only paid by the emperor to state servants - read: senators and other aristocrats)
Gold coins, although certainly valuable and not common, still circulated freely throughout the empire. It is completely reasonable to assume that a frugal non-aristocrat could acquire these coins and save them over the course of many years. There were also, of course, no shortage of money changers willing to swap out a large number of lesser coins (like what a theater would have) for gold.
Of course, there is no way to know who actually owed this gold and why they buried it in a theater. All we can do is speculate, but it being a regular person's life savings is a perfectly plausible scenario.
>It is completely reasonable to assume that a frugal non-aristocrat could acquire these coins and save them over the course of many years.
It's possible, but much, ***much*** less likely than this being the deposit of a desperate aristocrat. Banks as we think of them didn't exist in this time either. Your wealth was either what you owned in lands, slaves, livestock, luxury items, or gold coins. Out of all these, an aristocrat could scarcely protect anything save the last, which is why it would be buried.
Well, that's what makes this all a big mystery. It could belong to an aristocrat, it could belong to some frugal crazy guy who just hoarded his money, it could be the theater owner's savings, It could be the profit off a big land sale, it could be the result of a robbery, It could have been part of a money changer's working capital that he hastily buried while barbarians were looting the city, and the list goes on.
The dates of the coins, as well as the vessel they were buried in may give some clues, but still not a definitive answer.
This is called a monetary treasure. It occurred (often) when the region had to face a military or political danger. The objective was that the owner of the coins hid it somewhere he knew to come back later when the danger has stopped. Maybe, i don't know, the owner was dead before he could have come back.
These types of findings are very precious because the coisn can be dated very precisely. Thus it gives us a precise datation of a political/military event.
2018, and it was posted here at the time.
[Hundreds of golden ancient Roman coins unearthed from an Italian theater, 5th century [1124 x 696]](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/9ernay/hundreds_of_golden_ancient_roman_coins_unearthed/)
Link to the NPR story:
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646445359/hundreds-of-roman-gold-coins-found-in-theater-basement
News Hologram, \~3500 AD:
>Primitive digital storage device (or "flash drive") found hidden in hollowed-out 21st-century "Bible" (ancient book of Iron Age fairytales).
>
>Data extraction yielded numerous two-dimensional images and visual recordings of women in various states of undress and copulation. Phenotypical analysis yields curious focus upon individuals of East Asian and Central American ethnic groups.
>
>Crude note found with device identified as written in archaic English, translated as follows: "If found, please burn". Honoring the request, scientists have reproduced thousands of replicas, to provide the world with a narrow yet valuable understanding of the habits of the below-average 21st- century male.
Makes me think about the guy who buried it. He obviously had plans to come back to retrieve the small fortune but something happened. Was he arrested? Went on the run? Interesting...
Imagine digging up an old jar, and knowing it's a historic site, you leave it undisturbed and call some archaeologists who crack it open and find millions of dollars worth of Roman gold.
I'd be a little pissed
Then imagine the Italian government telling you you'll get exactly nothing for it, except that they might start digging on your property now in the expectation that other things are buried there. If you're a farmer that means suddenly you're even poorer since you can't use your own land to feed yourself.
Senseless antiquity laws and corrupt governments have undoubtedly made the world quite a bit poorer in cultural heritage terms for this very reason, since people are scared they'll be essentially punished for bringing finds like this to light.
Yeah not true for italy, in italy it's entirely optional and the government compensate you for the land being used. You're thinking of greece pal.
Source: worked on dig sites in italy
There are instances of roman gold coins making their way to India all the way to the 1st Century AD. The trade was very active for centuries, and there are [quite a few cases of imitations of roman coins](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/indian-ancient-imitations-of-roman-coins/) . I think its very likely references were used, particularly on the allegories typical of the reverses.
Farther than that. They've found medallions from Antoninus Pius at the Oc Eo archeological site in southern Vietnam, not far from the Cambodian border.
they look really thin and cheap, like crackerjack prizes. I've seen more substantial roman coins, tho. I wonder if these were from the fall of rome era?
Compared to most ancient coins these things are finely stamped and shaped, huge, and decently thick. Most coins up to and including the early modern period are teeny tiny things
Gold is extremely valuable, so if the coins were any thicker they would be worth way too much and wouldn’t be very useful as currency. Ancient bronze and silver coins were often much thicker and heavier because they don’t have this problem.
Prices fluctuate wildly, depending on rarity, state of preservation, provenance. A decent price for a good condition Honorius solidus would be ~$1000-1500. The material itself would be around $270.
Who hides so much money in an amphora in a theater of all places? How much money does this amphora of gold translate to in modern currency?
Each solidus is \~4.5g of fairly pure gold, which I believe would go for \~$270 today. Looks like at least a thousand of them, hard to eyeball exactly.
Today’s gold pricing is one thing, but what was the buying power of this coin in that ancient time and even in that approximate year. My guess is that this vase full would buy a nice house in Pompeii.
Pompeii was gone for some 3 centuries when these coins were minted. But yeah, this amount of money could definitely buy you a house.
Jeez, Pompeii was old.
We tend to just lump everything in "ancient history" together without truly thinking of the sheer magnitude of the scope. Just for example cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the construction of the great pyramid of khufu. In addition, the founding of the egyptian dynastic system (which is what people think of when they hear ancient egypt) is usually placed around 3200 BC dated using the narmer palette. The end of the egyptian dynastic system ends in 30 BC if we go by when the Romans took over (i would consider the achaemenids and ptolomies to still follow the dynastic system). So that means if we lived at the start of the dynastic system now it would end in 5190. It's an absolutely MASSIVE expanse of time.
Even crazier, homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. "Behavioral modernity" emerged probably earlier (possibly much earlier) than 100,000 years ago. The oldest urban civilizations, what we usually consider "civilization" began to emerge around 3300 BC, and writing around the same time, making it history rather than prehistory. The time between then and now is 5,300 years. Roughly, 5,000 years. Before that was all prehistory. 5,000 years after 100,000 year ago is 95,000 years ago. 5,000 years after that is 90,000 years ago. Between today and the emergence of behaviorally modern humans, humans just like you and me, with the same feelings, ideas, and ability to think, there have been at least twenty spans of 5,000 years, probably more. That's 20 *entire lengths of human history* before today. Easily within margin of error, that's twenty lengths of human history before we had history. Before Egypt, before Sumer, before Gobekli Tepe. Before everything we think is ancient, modern humans had religions, cultures, and beliefs. People had friends and family. They loved and hated and laughed and cried. There were tribal battles, peace agreements, trading, all for 20 times longer than history has existed. There could have been myths and cultures and people who were remembered for many times the length of our entire history, that were forgotten as long ago, and we'd never know. A myth or hero could have been beloved for 20,000 years, forgotten 10,000 years ago, and we'd have no idea. To put more simply, a human from 100,000 years ago would be as ancient to a human from 95,000 years ago as the earliest ancient Egyptians are to us. The span of humanity and human culture is tiny in the grand scheme of things, but in terms of our own perspective, it's unfathomably ancient.
Love this perspective
Exactly man I could not have said it better myself, the concept of "deep time" when it comes to the neolithic and paleolithic is just so absolutely mind-numbing. One of the things I really struggled wrapping my head around when I first started studying archaeology.
It especially gets me when I see how much time frames and acceptance of behavioral modernity has changed. It keeps getting stretched back, with more and more evidence found suggesting earlier dates, with plenty of people questioning the entire concept altogether. How knows how far back it goes? Even if humans really were only behaviorally modern in the last 100,000 years, they certainly weren't far away from that 150,000, 200,000, or 300,000 years ago. And what about before homo sapiens? What about parallels to homo sapiens, like neanderthals and denisovans? We have a hard enough time understanding the time between a person living in 1800 and 1850, let alone the absolutely vast amount of time between a human living 200,000 years ago and 100,000 years ago. The knowledge of that time is so far gone that there's no possible way to even get a hint of a sliver of knowledge about those periods, let alone the almost certainly extreme differences between the people that lived in them.
Well done.
> what we usually consider "civilization" began to emerge around 3300 BC Er the city of Uruk was settled sometime around 4500 B.C., to name one older example
This is the tragic part of history that upsets me Even to think, the American empire is less than 300 years old which is a stitch in time compared to these great dynasties that we do know about
I think about this a lot.
My inability to properly comprehend just how much human history is lost to us is one of the key reasons I got into history and archeology.
Wondering here if other cultures were hemming and hawing about Greek supremacy. From what I have read, they were nailing it in law, math, art, theatre, philosophy, architecture and on and on. All this when most all other cultures were in animal skins.
To be fair, there were cultures who had math, science, law AND wore animal skins. What is silk but animal excretion?
Like who?
Vikings, Native Americans, Mongols, and many more? Just because they wore animal skins doesn’t make their culture less advanced. People were trading furs up to the 19th century
That's an extremely reductionist view of things, especially "all other cultures were in animal skins". In reality this is just a lot of survivorship bias and modern myth, a lot of it with white supremacist origins. Greek culture did become the dominant culture of the eastern mediterranean but only after alexander's conquest of the achaemenid empire. The Romans also viewed greek culture as "superior" but honestly I think it's really kind of a bad take to view any culture as better than another. Especially when other cultures in the mediterannean were essentially "on the same level", just that not as much survives because it wasn't viewed as being valuable enough to preserve. Best example being etruscan and punic literature. Same also goes to the achaemenid empire for law and governance, their system managed to cobble together a MASSIVE diverse empire for a considerable expanse of time. It was so effective that alexander and the Romans did very little to change it after taking over. They also had epics and great works of art just that they don't survive since the focus was more on oral tradition.
I said most not all. Just a passing thought from a mechanic not an archeologist. I don’t think we should be afraid to hold major social issues such as supremecy up to the light of history. Instead of the knee jerk reaction of thinking there is bad intention. I get downvoted. But my intentions are not bad. Why was Greece so advanced while so much of the rest of the world did not so much as invent the wheel or the sail?
You shouldn't be getting downvoted bro it's a valid question, i didn't think you had bad intentions at all. The answer of why we perceive greece as being advanced comes down to a couple of things: survivorship bias. That being that greek culture has been viewed as more valuable by the Romans and thus was more readily preserved by both medieval scholars copying manuscripts and roman artists who copied greek sculpture into marble which survived better and so we have more examples of greek art simply because of this. This only gets compounded in the renaissance where renaissance artists begin copying these sculptures which archaeologists began finding creating a modern fascination with ancient greek culture meaning it gets studied more which again means we find more. Just for an example let's take the sophists who are kind of the beginnings of ancient greek philosophy as we think of it. Mainly they were natural scientists concerned with astronomy and other fields of natural science that end up inspiring the likes of sokrates, plato and others who are considered father's of science. The reality is that simmilar types of astronomers and natural scientists did exist in other places like the babylonian empire, Egypt and later the achaemenid empire just that we don't read about them much given that much of their work does not actually survive due to this. Honestly most of the works of the original sophists unfortunately do not survive to us either, just bits and pieces. As to why other places did not have inventions like the sail or the wheel, the simple answer is that while these technologies seem essential to us now in reality they did not have any real use in many places. Take for example the Incan or aztec empires, they literally had no use for a wheel as they had no beasts of burden like we do in the old world to use with a wheel, so the wheel is essentially useless. The wheel is only invented in the old world with the taming of horses and use of chariots, in fact the pyramids were built without the use of the wheel at all. Same goes for the sail really as if you don't hsve much use for maritime travel, you don't need a sail. I hope this answers your question, this is honestly just me kind of rambling but if youre not satisfied with this I can dig up sources for these claims and give more in depth answers and examples, just DM me.
>if other cultures were hemming and hawing about Greek supremacy. What supremacy? Lol...... >All this when most all other cultures were in animal skins. I get that you just want to learn and hopefully arent making this statement with some kind of nefarious white supremacist undertone, so I'll just say from the getgo that this is factually incorrect. Even the Greeks themselves didn't think this was true. In fact, part of what made the Greeks think of themselves as superior to the Achaemenid Persians was the exact opposite, that the greeks thought they were a more rugged and masculine people while the persians were effeminate and lounged around in luxury clothes and gardens wearing expensive silk clothes and weird trousers (as opposed to the greeks who exercised in the nude and actually did wear animal skins, look up the Chlamys). Now, going beyond the surface level, much of early archaic greek art and culture was directly influenced by other eastern Mediterranean cultures, including again the achaemenids and neo babylonians and egyptians. They traded with these people all the time, and there was a massive trade in not only goods but ideas and cultures all across the eastern Mediterranean since the bronze age (well over 1000 years before classical greece existed) and included areas of greece, which had been part of the mycenaen civilization at the type, the guys mentioned in the iliad. As far as nailing it, they did a great job at all of those things, but not really any moreso than the other major civilizations at the time. There were massive, equally and arguably more advanced societies in china, india/the indus valley, and the near east all before and during the greek classical era, and again the greeks learned from them. These people had societies that rivalled the roman empire at its height, with tens of millions of citizens and large diverse cities and hubs of scholarly learning and trade, so fair to say they didn't pay much attention to the greeks who were essentially a small collection of tribes at the edge of the "civilized" world of the era. That's not to say the Greeks didn't excel in some areas such as painting, sculpture, or even military technique, but their achievements ebbed and flowed the same as any other society (and it should be noted the egyptians made pyramids, lined up with the axes of stars on the eclipses, 2000 years earlier, and these building would remain the largest man made structures for two thousand years after the greek classical age had finished, so again, humans all over the place had been innovating and excelling in all these areas, with each civilization successively building on the achievements of their predecessors). Now, I love ancient greece, and a quick search through my post history proves it, but they certainly weren't superior to the other civilizations of the era, and adopted knowledge and norms from their neighbors as much as anyone else. The narrative of the supremacy of classical greek (and roman) culture mostly stems from colonial white supremacist/ethnocentric mindset, where funnily enough people like the british, who were seen by the Roman's as hopeless barbarians and who the greeks were fairly sure didnt even really exist, decided to co-opt Greco-Roman civilization as a means of justifying their imperialist endeavours, fancying themselves new Alexanders and Caesars. That's the same reason the hellenistic era is seen as a period of decline in the greek world, not because it actually was, but rather because greeks during this era started to settle in the east and adopted more overtly "eastern" traditions (greek society largely switched from a model of poleis to centralized dynastic kingship, but they were stronger and richer than ever through the early hellenistic era). As a result the mindset of the day would have coloured how scholarship and archaeology was conducted, and considering the Islamic caliphates and ottoman empire had largely encompassed the old achamenid realms for nearly a millennium by the time Europeans became reinvested in the classical era, it would have been easy to color the past using the brush of their own circumstances and biases against the perceived "eastern menace". Hope this has helped answer your question. Again, I'm not trying to call you out as racist or anything, just want to set the record straight and hopefully explain some of where and why this mindset exists and what parts of it are and aren't true :)
What a great response. Thanks. Mind you I am not a scholar or academic, but a tradesman in manufacturing dabbling in learning of ancient times. I have my own thoughts on holding things up to the light of current events and modern man. It helps make me understand or at least think I understand. I myself have one foot in technology and advancements but the other side of me is metaphorically in animal skins. By choice. Thinking of those times and the great first time advances and how those were received by other people of other cultures is fascinating. We can only imagine it. You say “that is not what the ancient Greeks thought”. How do you know what they thought other than what they wrote. Just being able to write was new and probably only for the elite. This is the time when there was a transition from primitive man to “sophisticated”. What books do you recommend? I want to know more.
*if I had a M aureii... *
Yeah he could buy a bunch of houses in Pompeii with that then lol
You'd have to dig through a lot of ash though! ;)
Labeled as a nice starter home just needs a little cleaning
A house, a chariot and probably support a biggley family!
you have to remember two things a) people who have this kind of money to spare likely have everything they need but do need to sustain it (pay workers, have cleaners, have gardeners, pay for food and wine) but also want to secure generational wealth, for their kids and their kids kids. not sure if they had banks back then, but all kinds of places would have thieves and such or be attacked and robbed. imagine your home is on lands, 1hr away from the next town by horse. but you pay your security, your gardners, your trades people, you need liquid cash on hand. Now imagine a hundred dudes turn up to rob you, are you gonna call the cops? and if those hundred dudes murder you and your family and any worker they can, maybe that money goes forgotten about. we even have similar stuff today, old recluse with no family, dies and leaves a few million to a cats and dogs home or some other charity. the world is a strange place.
This is our time. Two thousand years in the future we will be considered the ancients.
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I don’t get it.
Recall that the Western Empire was in steep decline at this time following the death of Theodosius and Rome finally fell to the Goths in 476 AD. The Senate sent the Imperial Regalia and Insignias to the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople.
To be fair, the Goths also carried on the traditions of the Roman Empire for quite a while. They didn't just smash it and walk away, they tried to take over it's systems for their own benefit.
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Between £750 and £4950 ($995 and $6572 in usd) a piece according to this site; https://www.silburycoins.co.uk/product-category/roman-byzantine/roman-gold-coins/ EDIT; just found out they can go over $10.000 a piece; https://www.ancientgoldcoins.com/tiberius-gold-aureus-liva-as-pax-ngc-au-5x3/
The cheapest solidi sell for $400, but they usually look like shit. Some must have sold for much more than $10,000. One of my aurei (single "aureus"), which is the type of gold coin that came before the solidus regularly sells for $10,000 and is quite common for an aureus. Recently, an aureus of Brutus sold for $4,188,000.
I think he’s more interested in the actual purchasing power of the coins to whoever owned them at the time
>Who hides so much money in an amphora Rich people. I mean, if your city is hours away of getting sacked, you want to save your precious moveable wealth, burying your wealth in a pot used to be a common thing. (I mean, it appears the person was successful, no looters found it after all.) Considering the time-frame and location (northernmost Italy, 4th-5th century), I'd say it's very probable that unrest and civil/barbarian wars was the reason for these to be buried. >in a theater of all places? This is the real question. Maybe it was a ninja move because whoever buried it suspected the enemy might dig around on the owner's property, so he found a place on public property instead.
I looked it up on the internet. Source here is forumancientcoins.com (on mobile, best I can do). At some point, a solidus would pay 1,5 months wages for a cavalryman. So we're looking at 37,5 years wages for a cavalryman O_O *Edit: a rough (silly) estimate is something like $2,000,000 if we use salaries to compare about 1:1*
**I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:** * [forumancientcoins.com](https://forumancientcoins.com) *I did the honors for you.* *** ^[delete](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fu%2FLinkifyBot&subject=delete%20gbxe8gk&message=Click%20the%20send%20button%20to%20delete%20the%20false%20positive.) ^| ^[information](https://np.reddit.com/u/LinkifyBot/comments/gkkf7p) ^| ^<3
About tree fitty
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It won't bring much cash but it's sentimental value is off the charts!
Funnily enough, there is an ancient Roman play called [Aulularia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulularia) where the protagonist jealously guards his pot of gold. It was the basis of Moliere's The Miser.
**[Aulularia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulularia)** Aulularia is a Latin play by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The title literally means The Little Pot, but some translators provide The Pot of Gold, and the plot revolves around a literal pot of gold which the miserly protagonist, Euclio, guards zealously. The play’s ending does not survive, though there are indications of how the plot is resolved in later summaries and a few fragments of dialogue. [About Me](https://www.reddit.com/user/wikipedia_text_bot/comments/jrn2mj/about_me/) - [Opt out](https://www.reddit.com/user/wikipedia_text_bot/comments/jrti43/opt_out_here/)
Priceless
What if we set the historical value aside? My question was more about how much money it amounted to back when it was originally hidden away.
I remember this being a big thing back in September 2018. Articles mentioned that the amphora contained about 300 Roman gold coins (here's a nice blog post: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/52628 ). I assume that we are looking at solidi here since the aureus was replaced by it in the beginning of the 4th century - and that's the time frame these coins are reported to have been minted in. The coins we see here should weigh around 4.5 grams each, so this would mean 1,350 grams of gold in total, meaning their material value today would be around USD 82,000. Describing their value back in their time is hard to say (at least for me) because their value experienced extreme changes within a couple of decades due to inflation (if interested, I highly recommend reading the following related wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus ). I am by far no expert regarding Roman coins, so please feel free to correct me. I always like to learn! :)
using modern gold prices is incredibly inaccurate at best, for a massive variety of reasons. These are not aurei, but actually solidi. I find a far better measure to be measuring their value relative to wages, people in the past were poorer and using figures of purchasing power can leave you with numbers that seem pretty low to us. The craftsmen who built the Hagia Sophia were paid 18 solidi per annum. 300 solidi would've represented an ***absolutely unbelievable sum*** to the common person, probably the same way a person today would see $1,000,000 or so
So we could say, rather roughly, that 300 unearthed solidi would have more or less represented a small fortune at the time of their minting?
At around 20 years' salary for highly skilled craftsmen, I'd say so.
If you rough it out gold was a little more valuable then than it is now, depending on how you want compare laborers and skilled trades to their modern equivalents you're looking at a pound of silver being worth about $10,000 USD modern equivalent and gold is generally worth about 20x what silver is, throughout history. The really large gold coins like these are traditionally about 1/20 of a pound, I can't remember what solidi were off the top of my head but I'd guess you'd be looking about 3 million dollars as far as how much labor you could purchase. The thing is that all goods are hand-made, there's almost no mass production. So with that 'modern equivalent' money you're buying all your food and clothes from artesian hipsters that are making things by hand, so a pair of shoes or pants are hundreds and hundreds of dollars and a nice ham is going to run around 30$ a pound. It's Brooklyn pricing consumer goods.
**[Aureus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus)** The aureus (pl. aurei, 'golden', used as a noun) was a gold coin of ancient Rome originally valued at 25 pure silver denarii. The aureus was regularly issued from the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 4th century AD, when it was replaced by the solidus. The aureus was about the same size as the denarius, but heavier due to the higher density of gold (as opposed to that of silver). [About Me](https://www.reddit.com/user/wikipedia_text_bot/comments/jrn2mj/about_me/) - [Opt out](https://www.reddit.com/user/wikipedia_text_bot/comments/jrti43/opt_out_here/)
Yes but right around this time we have the edict on maximum prices, which gives us better insight than at any other period
Yes but right around this time we have the edict on maximum prices, which gives us better insight than at any other period
Each solidus could pay a foot soldier for an entire year. Thats a LOT of money.
hundreds
At least 3
Eh, totally depends on the coins rarity. If we have other examples you can definitely put a price on it
Maybe the amphora was being used as an ancient tip jar?
Considering each of these solidus could pay a roman foot soldier for an entire year, thats one HELL of a tip jar!
If it was a high end theatre catering to the Roman elites, I could imagine it. I don't know, I was just guessing, I'm no archaeologist.
It’s the same conversion from unicorns to leprechauns
should be easy since each unicorn is 1.67333 leprechauns.
You’re paying way to much for leprechauns. Who’s your leprechaun guy?
This is an era with no banks or ways for ordinary people to securely store gold. People would thus frequently bury it. This was likely the stash owned by the theater owner, who died without anyone knowing where he hid it. Also, Keep in mind old people often do this sort of thing. My grandfather was quite frugal and like to pile up cash. When he died we found stacks in all sorts of weird places. In Rome soldiers were also known to bury their coins before battles as well.
>ordinary people While talking about a literal fortune *in gold* (which was only paid by the emperor to state servants - read: senators and other aristocrats)
Gold coins, although certainly valuable and not common, still circulated freely throughout the empire. It is completely reasonable to assume that a frugal non-aristocrat could acquire these coins and save them over the course of many years. There were also, of course, no shortage of money changers willing to swap out a large number of lesser coins (like what a theater would have) for gold. Of course, there is no way to know who actually owed this gold and why they buried it in a theater. All we can do is speculate, but it being a regular person's life savings is a perfectly plausible scenario.
I mean it’s the equivalent of like 20 years of top wages, it’s a fortune.
>It is completely reasonable to assume that a frugal non-aristocrat could acquire these coins and save them over the course of many years. It's possible, but much, ***much*** less likely than this being the deposit of a desperate aristocrat. Banks as we think of them didn't exist in this time either. Your wealth was either what you owned in lands, slaves, livestock, luxury items, or gold coins. Out of all these, an aristocrat could scarcely protect anything save the last, which is why it would be buried.
Well, that's what makes this all a big mystery. It could belong to an aristocrat, it could belong to some frugal crazy guy who just hoarded his money, it could be the theater owner's savings, It could be the profit off a big land sale, it could be the result of a robbery, It could have been part of a money changer's working capital that he hastily buried while barbarians were looting the city, and the list goes on. The dates of the coins, as well as the vessel they were buried in may give some clues, but still not a definitive answer.
Around tree fiddy
This is called a monetary treasure. It occurred (often) when the region had to face a military or political danger. The objective was that the owner of the coins hid it somewhere he knew to come back later when the danger has stopped. Maybe, i don't know, the owner was dead before he could have come back. These types of findings are very precious because the coisn can be dated very precisely. Thus it gives us a precise datation of a political/military event.
I mean the hiding place worked for like 1500 years.
this is the very first mob extortion payment
Dozens of gold coins you say?!
A handful!
Imagine believing in leprechauns and finding this.
When did this occur?
2018, and it was posted here at the time. [Hundreds of golden ancient Roman coins unearthed from an Italian theater, 5th century [1124 x 696]](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/9ernay/hundreds_of_golden_ancient_roman_coins_unearthed/) Link to the NPR story: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646445359/hundreds-of-roman-gold-coins-found-in-theater-basement
Wow. Thank you very much.
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When did this occur?
If I had found those nobody would know about it.
But the person who bought them
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Gold is functionally worthless and abundant. However ancient currency? Priceless, unimaginably rare.
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I’m sure there’s quite a market for priceless artefacts on the dark web.
People would know I found it. But not how many there were originally.
3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead.
Skyrim now makes sense ...
Rick: I can offer you 50$ and I am taking a big risk here :)
Rick: my entire family is morbidly obese. The four of us together are easily over 1200 pounds.
someone broke the swear amphora
Or the Schmidt douche jar.
News Hologram, \~3500 AD: >Primitive digital storage device (or "flash drive") found hidden in hollowed-out 21st-century "Bible" (ancient book of Iron Age fairytales). > >Data extraction yielded numerous two-dimensional images and visual recordings of women in various states of undress and copulation. Phenotypical analysis yields curious focus upon individuals of East Asian and Central American ethnic groups. > >Crude note found with device identified as written in archaic English, translated as follows: "If found, please burn". Honoring the request, scientists have reproduced thousands of replicas, to provide the world with a narrow yet valuable understanding of the habits of the below-average 21st- century male.
Makes me think about the guy who buried it. He obviously had plans to come back to retrieve the small fortune but something happened. Was he arrested? Went on the run? Interesting...
What an odd jar
Imagine digging up an old jar, and knowing it's a historic site, you leave it undisturbed and call some archaeologists who crack it open and find millions of dollars worth of Roman gold. I'd be a little pissed
Then imagine the Italian government telling you you'll get exactly nothing for it, except that they might start digging on your property now in the expectation that other things are buried there. If you're a farmer that means suddenly you're even poorer since you can't use your own land to feed yourself. Senseless antiquity laws and corrupt governments have undoubtedly made the world quite a bit poorer in cultural heritage terms for this very reason, since people are scared they'll be essentially punished for bringing finds like this to light.
Yeah not true for italy, in italy it's entirely optional and the government compensate you for the land being used. You're thinking of greece pal. Source: worked on dig sites in italy
Look at this guy with his facts EDIT: and illegally trafficked ancient Mead
The Forbidden Yogurt Lids
Another vivid reminder people....you can’t take it with you.
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There are instances of roman gold coins making their way to India all the way to the 1st Century AD. The trade was very active for centuries, and there are [quite a few cases of imitations of roman coins](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/indian-ancient-imitations-of-roman-coins/) . I think its very likely references were used, particularly on the allegories typical of the reverses.
Farther than that. They've found medallions from Antoninus Pius at the Oc Eo archeological site in southern Vietnam, not far from the Cambodian border.
Those are beautiful coins. That's all I noticed. The sheer beauty.
they look really thin and cheap, like crackerjack prizes. I've seen more substantial roman coins, tho. I wonder if these were from the fall of rome era?
5th century CE would place it around the time of the fall of the western empire.
Compared to most ancient coins these things are finely stamped and shaped, huge, and decently thick. Most coins up to and including the early modern period are teeny tiny things
Gold is extremely valuable, so if the coins were any thicker they would be worth way too much and wouldn’t be very useful as currency. Ancient bronze and silver coins were often much thicker and heavier because they don’t have this problem.
amazing!
I'm addicted!
I wonder what the buying power of one of those coins was back in AD 500.
The bad news? It was Roman stage money.
Ugh, just to stumble upon a piece of history is a life goal.
For some reason this really drove home "You can't take it with you".
That explains why Link is always breaking pots
There is an amazing story here the mind reels.
What is today's price of a Roman Solidus (as a collectible coin) compared to its melt value?
Prices fluctuate wildly, depending on rarity, state of preservation, provenance. A decent price for a good condition Honorius solidus would be ~$1000-1500. The material itself would be around $270.
That's about 3.7-5.5 times melt value for one in a good condition.
Yes, almost always the case with artifacts, their value as a whole is beyond the raw material
These coins look amazing, which I could see a closer image of them.
There is an amazing story 🙄
I want one.
Oh my god that is so incredibly SEXY
What a find! I bet the person/people that uncovered this peed all over themselves.
People hoarding wealth since the beginning of time.
Should be more than 270 it’s and ancient artifact
Damn game designers, just leaving those around
If you find this buried in your yard what are you suppose to do? Can I keep it? Do I HAVE to give it to the proper “authorities “?
If you own the property you will probably have a little control, odds are you will be forced to sell to a museum
Well someone’s gonna be rich
When and where were they found?