FORGOTTEN COIN MAY PROVE ROMAN EMPEROR WAS REAL
A gold coin which had previously been dismissed as a forgery appears to be authentic and depicts a long-lost Roman emperor named Sponsian, according to a new study at the University of Central London.
If you ever needed to convince your friends or family that the study of coins can really change history, then this is the example to use. The coin, housed at The Hunterian collection at the University of Glasgow, was among a handful of coins of the same design unearthed in Transylvania, in present-day Romania, in 1713. They have been regarded as fakes since the mid-19th-century, due to their crude, strange design features and jumbled inscriptions.
In the new study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers compared the Sponsian coin with other Roman coins kept at The Hunterian, including two that are known to be genuine. They found minerals on the coin’s surface that were consistent with it being buried in soil over a long period of time, and then exposed to air. These minerals were cemented in place by silica – cementing that would naturally occur over a long time in soil.
The team also found a pattern of wear and tear that suggested the coin had been in active circulation. Lead author Professor Paul N. Pearson (UCL Earth Sciences) said: ‘Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity. Our evidence suggests he ruled Roman Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost, at a time when the empire was beset by civil wars and the borderlands were overrun by plundering invaders.’
The Roman province of Dacia, a territory overlapping with modern-day Romania, was a region prized
