Roman Coins Seminar

Just like that: Roman coins seminar

The 3rd year students on the Roman Society and Identity Course (ARGY ) had a real treat this afternoon because Keith Sugden brought out some trays of Roman coins to show them. We shared the teaching. Keith took the first half hour and talked about the Roman currency system from the time of Republic to the late 2nd century.  There were gold aurei, chunky sestertii and even an issue in memory of Antinoos, favourite of the Emperor Hadrian.

Inspecting the coins

The great thing about this seminar was that students could not only see the coins up close in the trays, they could handle them as well, gold coins included. Roslynne Bell the tutor commented that it was a good turn out for last thing on a Friday afternoon but the pulling power of Roman coins may have had something to do with it.

Tutor Roslynne Bell

Meanwhile I think I rather drew the short straw because I picked up the second half of the seminar by talking about coins during the later Roman empire, including the debasement of the silver coinage, copying and coins as archaeological site finds. Of course I couldn’t offer anything as nice as Keith’s choice specimens but perhaps that was the point. The students had to familiarise themselves with the coins that turn up on sites: the incredibly worn, corroded and often low weight copies and even downright forgeries that passed for legal tender in the province of Britannia during the later 3rd and 4th centuries. They are a far cry from the pristine coins that are shown in books about the Roman Empire.

Some of the site finds are vile. However, when they turn up in significant numbers they offer the opportunity to present the information in the form of a table or a coin histogram. Comparing the histograms  showing coins losses for a number of sites in Britain showed that many have a similar pattern of coin loss: low rates of coin loss during the first two centuries and then a sudden increase in coin loss during the later 3rd century. Low value radiates make up one of the peaks on the graph in Casey’s Period 18 (260-270). This was followed by the reform of the Emperor Aurelian (270-5).

The high face value of such reformed radiates or aureliani and lack of suitable low denomination coins led to the continued circulation of radiates and radiate copies. There followed a series of falling away from the new standards punctuated by further coin reforms until coinage ceased to be supplied to the province in the early 5th century AD. It used to be thought that the radiate and ‘Fallen Horsemen’ copies filled the gap but it looks as though when gold and silver coins stopped arriving the low value bronze coins that were circulating ceased to enjoy public confidence and the economy collapsed. It is a fascinating period of history. All this in half an hour!

Stone tools

children from Bury Grammar check out the latest education session using archaeology objects

Recently I’ve been doing some work with Hannah-Lee Chalk in the engagement team to develop a session for school children using objects from the archaeology collection. Here you can see children from Bury Grammar School puzzling over stone objects. It was a year 1 class, 17 pupils, and they were piloting a new session (name still to be confirmed) for Key Stage 1 classes that we hope to offer next school year.

Some of the objects are natural; some are natural but were thought to be the earliest stone tools worked by human hand, called eoliths; others may look like artefacts but are not; others are Palaeolithic stone tools perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old.

The idea was to encourage the children to look at the objects and to work out whether they were natural or whether they were man-made. These were the kinds of questions asked by William Boyd Dawkins and Wilfrid Jackson at the Manchester Museum in the first half of the 20th century. They built up collections of stone objects as reference material and for teaching purposes. Some of the objects given to the children had holes in them, but some were natural holes and some had been made deliberately by human hand.

What might they have been used for? In some cases one might speculate the perforated stones were net sinkers used in fishing or perhaps to weight down roofing materials. Some can be identified with some confidence as perforated stone mace heads or counter weights for digging sticks. Some stones looked like knives or spearheads but the bedding planes of the rock showed that they wouldn’t have made very effective tools or weapons. We have three boxes of such material. Perhaps there’s a case for disposal?

Class Teacher, Rachel Hankinson, said that the children had a wonderful time, seeing and being able to touch objects associated with prehistoric man rather than looking at powerpoints in the classroom. She said the children were absolutely enthralled and could not stop talking about the trip all the way home. Even today in school they are looking for axe head shapes!

Which bodes well for the future as we develop this pilot into a fully-fledged offer for schools.

Thanks to Hannah and Rachel for this feedback.

 

Gladiators

Roman lamp used in ‘Dig Stories’

Since the opening of Ancient Worlds last autumn I have been doing some work to support colleagues in education who are using the new displays for teaching. I suggested some Greco-Roman objects for a session called ‘Dig Stories’. Debbie Doran in our education team chose some oil lamps for use in the session. One of the lamps is a Roman lamp showing two gladiators fighting. Last week I spent some time trying to identify which gladiators in particular they are. There is, it turns out, a bewildering variety of gladiators: secutor, thraex, samnite, murmillo, retiarius, even a gladiator woman or gladiatorix, to name but a few!

Detail showing two gladiators – perhaps secutors

The list is bewildering but no doubt the Roman audience in the arena had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the different kinds of gladiator and his or her weaponry and equipment. I can imagine Roman schoolboys collecting sets of gladiator-themed cards or stickers in the same way that we used to collect cards or stickers showing footballers or dinosaurs in the 1970s and 1980s. There were always rare issues and buying the stickers from the local newsagents was ruinously expensive as I recall. Playtimes were mostly taken up by impromptu ‘swapsie’ sessions to try and collect the full set. I don’t know if they ever released a ‘Gladiators of the Ancient World’ set but I can just picture Roman schoolboys shouting “I’ll swap you my murmillo for a secutor but my gladiatrix is worth both!”

The heavy rounded helmet, shields, arm protectors and greaves used by the gladiators on our lamp seem to identify them as secutors. It’s interesting that the gladiators are mirror images of one another, which suggests the gladiator on the right is left-handed. The British Museum has a relief showing two women gladiators ‘Amazon’ and ‘Achilia’  (presumably their professional fighting names) who are also shown as mirror images of one another.  This may be no more than artistic licence, however. There are certainly lots of representations of right-handed gladiators squaring off, with the shield and the sword held appropriately. It does raise the question of what evidence there is for left-handedness in the Ancient World. Was it simply beaten out of men who had to hold their shield and weapon in a certain way in order to maintain an effective military formation? A hoplite holding his shield on the right hand side just wouldn’t work would it?

Relief showing women gladiators in the British Museum

You can find out more about the different kinds of gladiators from Susanna Shadrake’s The World of the Gladiator (2005) which features reconstruction drawings and photos of re-enactors equipped as the different kinds of fighters. It’s good to know that ‘Amazon’ and ‘Achilia’ were freed after thrilling the crowds.

Gladiator lamp at Manchester Museum

Ancient Worlds and Teaching

Bronze figurine of the god Mithras in the Manchester Museum collection

Over the last week I’ve done a number of object handling sessions for 1st year Classics students at the University. A group came over this morning with their tutor Dr Roberta Mazza, who is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. I focused on the Manchester word square , the five word puzzle in which the letters PATER NOSTER and the letters A and O have been detected.

Word square or palindrome from Manchester (photo by Alan Seabright)

 

The Latin for ‘Our father’ from the Lord’s prayer and A and O for Christ’s ‘I am the beginning and I am the end’ appear to be deliberate. We discussed whether the word square should be regarded as the earliest evidence of Christianity in  northern Britain or whether it is just a doodle or piece of graffiti scratched onto the side of a pot.

Dr Roberta Mazza and students looking at the wordsquare and related objects

The word square is on display in our new Ancient Worlds displays so I got out a replica for Roberta and her students to have a closer look at. We talked about the different interpretations and explored other evidence for Christianity in Roman Britain. I mentioned how previous research had attributed the destruction of temples dedicated to the god Mithras to Christian communities. So, if what looks like a deliberately damaged Mithraic temple is found, one might infer the presence of a Christian community nearby, which is a more negative form of evidence of adherents of the religion. This can be found in Charles Thomas’ book on Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (Batsford, 1981). Early Christians found Mithraism’s similarity to Christianity too close for comfort (both have as a central figure a man who undergoes a trial or an ordeal that symbolises the wider struggle between good and evil).

By chance we happen to have a rather interesting bronze figurine (see the photo above) depicting Mithras with an inscription. Sadly we don’t know where it comes from but it was great to get out the figurine as a tangible piece of evidence of the Mithraism.

It is interesting that remains of a Mithraeum was found at Hulme in Manchester in 1821 but we don’t know enough to say whether it had been destroyed by a Christian mob or not. Perhaps if we did have that evidence – as apparently survives on Hadrian’s Wall and at the Walbrook in London – we might have another tentative piece of evidence for Christianity in Roman Manchester.

Of course if the word square is simply the result of someone with too much time on their hands, it is a huge coincidence that the words PATER NOSTER and the letter A and O can be sifted out of the 25 letters that make up the 5 word palindrome. But then an American commentator has noted that Ronald Wilson Reagan is an anagram of ‘Insane Anglo Warlord’. The letters of ‘President Clinton Of the USA’ when rearranged give you ‘ To Copulate he finds interns’! I mean, you couldn’t make this up could you?

The rearrangement of the letters that make up his name must be just coincidence. So extracting PATERNOSTER out of the word square is just another seemingly unlikely coincidence, though I suspect conspiracy theorists might beg to differ.