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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You wouldn't care to be more helpful, would you, Wiley?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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You have been asked to choose fake or find.
You have wisely chosen fake, for the reasons you post.
If it was a find, the explanations deity of a tribe, the tribe itself, unknown king who has the name of the tribe, or deity you refute.
I have opted for find. Let's take a look.
| The name has been interpreted as 'mighty as Esos', a contemporary Celtic god. It is not clear whether Esunertos was a friend or even usurper of Commius (or Commios). Nevertheless, alongside Commios, his is the earliest attested name on a British-made Iron Age coin. |
So we need to take into account other similar coins..... same cause same effect.
| Stylistically, the coinage is similar to Commios, ruler of the Atrebates. After Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55 and 54 BC, he was made a client king at Silchester. Commios is known to have struck coins in his own name from 30 BC. The three known coins of Esunertos centre around Danebury Hill Fort, placing his territory around this prehistoric site towards the end of the Iron Age period. |
What do Commios and Esunertos and the other client kings, ie sons of Comimios have in common. They exist in the years of the various Roman invasions of Britain?
During the Republic, Rome used to entrust the founding of their conolies to Three Commisioners. These were known as Triumviri......
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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That is helpful... up to a point. Up to the point where any coin-forger would be able to consult the same sources as you.
I am not, by the way, declaring it to be a fake. I find myself in the familiar position of being able to indicate why it might be, while being insufficiently knowledgeable about ancient coinage to indicate it might not be. The reverse of the position normally adopted by numismatists -- academic, amateur or commercial.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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These commisioners would distribute out new land, advising where colonists could build homes, oversee communal building activities, lead discussion ceremies, and so on. The idea was to start up a new minature Rome.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| The three known coins of Esunertos centre around Danebury Hill Fort, placing his territory around this prehistoric site towards the end of the Iron Age period. |
There've been excavations of Danebury hillfort from 1859 until relatively modern times. Augustus Franks and Augustus Pitt-Rivers excavated small areas but the main campaign of excavation was by Barry Cunliffe in the 1970s and '80s when a substantial area of the interior was excavated and recorded but not even Cunliffe's team found any trace of 'Esunertos'. Danebury now holds the record of being the most frequently and/or intensively excavated hillfort in Britain.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Three (aha) later kings, Tincomarus, Eppillus and Verica, are named on their coins as sons of Commius.
The next name appearing on the coins after Commius is Tincomarus.
Originally known as Tincommius (just saying....), his rule, lasting about 25 years, ended during the Trinovantian. (It's not a celtic tribe according to Wiley) Interregnum.
Tincomarus afterwards appears, so they say, in Rome seeking assistance from Augustus, supposedly deposed.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Hatty wrote: | | The three known coins of Esunertos centre around Danebury Hill Fort, placing his territory around this prehistoric site towards the end of the Iron Age period. |
There've been excavations of Danebury hillfort from 1859 until relatively modern times. Augustus Franks and Augustus Pitt-Rivers excavated small areas but the main campaign of excavation was by Barry Cunliffe in the 1970s and '80s when a substantial area of the interior was excavated and recorded but not even Cunliffe's team found any trace of 'Esunertos'. Danebury now holds the record of being the most frequently and/or intensively excavated hillfort in Britain. |
| Stylistically, the coinage is similar to Commios, ruler of the Atrebates. |
I get you, but are you rejecting all the Atrebates coins?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Hatty's general point (I imagine) is that Franks and Pitt-Rivers are a coupla chancers whereas Cunliffe isn't. The completeness of excavations at Danebury supports the idea of no-coinage Iron Age Britain. This is, by our standards, fairly settled but what is not is the degree to which Roman history was invented in the Renaissance era. If the Atrebates were coined to fit with the Artois region of Belgium (rather than the other way round) and the Belgic invasion of Britain a fantasy, then the three sons and the three coins are fakes.
But looking at it another way, if the three coins can be shown to be fakes by other means, it will assist in the revisionist history of Iron Age and Roman Britain generally.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The earliest written reference to 'Atrebates' is in Ptolemy's Geographia. Unfortunately no manuscript of his famous work exists prior to the earliest Byzantine maps dated c. 1300 which are believed to be at least partly influenced by Roman land surveying and mapmaking know-how finally being appreciated with the revival of Classical learning in Renaissance Europe
It is paradoxical, however, that a literate society, heir to Greek and Roman learning, should have left so few traces of an interest in mapping...
Notwithstanding their complexity, some of these conditions should have been favorable to the survival of classical cartographic knowledge. It is disappointing, therefore, that so few maps have come down to us from the whole of the Byzantine millennium. Moreover, it is quite clear that these few are representative neither of the theoretical cartography developed by the Greeks nor of the applied mapping practiced by the Romans. In addition, there are fewer literary allusions to maps from the Byzantine period than from the Roman period, so that once again our expectations cannot be matched by actual evidence |
These 'survivals' are seemingly so rare that there's not much if anything comparable with which to authenticate them, never mind attribute authorship by the time the work was published. According to historians the Geographia was "highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance Europe"
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| According to historians the Geographia was "highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance Europe" |
This sort of things gets said over and over again. Indeed, that's what Renaissance means. Since we have a rooted aversion to things going to sleep for a thousand years and then bursting into life all over again in the same form, it's better to just shove them in altogether into the same time frame.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The tribes were recorded by Ptolemy apparently in 150 B.C. which would be three centuries later than the purportedly 'earliest coins to circulate in Britain'. But luckily for posterity a source with a Phoenician-sounding name has been found
| Ptolemy relied on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, who continually updated his work as new information became available |
Trouble is, despite the grandiose claims made on his behalf,
a Greek-speaking Roman geographer, cartographer and mathematician, who founded mathematical geography and provided the underpinnings of Claudius Ptolemy's influential Geography. [Wiki]
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Marinus of Tyre turns out to be a 'lost' source and strangely absent from contemporary records.
The sole mentions are acknowledgements attributed to Ptolemy and al-Mas'udi (c. 896-956), an Arab geographer aka 'the Herodotus of the Arabs' no less, though himself similarly underreported by contemporaries
| Apart from what al-Mas'udi writes of himself little is known. |
It's strikingly familiar vis-a-vis our own 'Herodotus', the once venerated Bede
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A good test, Wiley, would be to choose one coin among the 45,000 you'd be prepared to stand behind.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Hatty wrote: |
The tribes were recorded by Ptolemy apparently in 150 B.C. which would be three centuries later than the purportedly 'earliest coins to circulate in Britain'. But luckily for posterity a source with a Phoenician-sounding name has been found
| Ptolemy relied on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, who continually updated his work as new information became available |
Trouble is, despite the grandiose claims made on his behalf,
a Greek-speaking Roman geographer, cartographer and mathematician, who founded mathematical geography and provided the underpinnings of Claudius Ptolemy's influential Geography. [Wiki]
|
Marinus of Tyre turns out to be a 'lost' source and strangely absent from contemporary records.
The sole mentions are acknowledgements attributed to Ptolemy and al-Mas'udi (c. 896-956), an Arab geographer aka 'the Herodotus of the Arabs' no less, though himself similarly underreported by contemporaries
| Apart from what al-Mas'udi writes of himself little is known. |
It's strikingly familiar vis-a-vis our own 'Herodotus', the once venerated Bede |
This is all mega helpful.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | According to historians the Geographia was "highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance Europe" |
This sort of things gets said over and over again. Indeed, that's what Renaissance means. Since we have a rooted aversion to things going to sleep for a thousand years and then bursting into life all over again in the same form, |
Renaissance, revolution, redivivus, economic cycle, messianic age. Just forms of circular thinking.......
| Mick Harper wrote: | | it's better to just shove them in altogether into the same time frame. |
Well, folks that believe in linear time seem to have a lot of problems agreeing which time frame, when it starts (which prophet? the foundation of which city? which festival? or which king? minus 300-500 years [mysteriously round number?]) and also appear to be obssessively overdating events and objects that cannot possibly be known, as well as dating based on stylistic sequences that tell you nothing (going on functionality is better) . Arguably it's also a bit bizarre to be writing linear accounts for folks that lived through eras, who clearly had different calendars and differring notions of time. Despite all this linear effort, mysteriously we still see folks adopt circular views such as, say, revolutions (Marxists) or (liberal mainstream) economic cycles, or renaissance as a stylistic explanation.
I doubt you will eliminate this type of thinking because it actually serves a functionality within those wedded to a linear paradigm. They are lost in a forest without it. Still, circular thinkers are lost in a maze......What do I know?
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