Folia archeologica 25.

Katalin Bíró-Sey: A find of centenionales from Brigetio

CF.NTENIONALES FROM BRIGETIO 149 As for its chronological division, the find gives a different picture from the ensembles of the same period. In comparison with other 4th century coin hoards, containing regularly several thousands of coins, it is, quantitatively, very small. Comparing its percentage with the hoard found at the nearby Öregcsém, we see that about 10 per cent of the Öregcsém find consist of coins struck before 364, while in the Brigetio hoard this period is represented by 54 per cent of the total; as for the coins after 364 this percentage is 80 to 23. For the composition of Valentinian coin hoards it is characteristic that a minor part of the coins was always struck in the times of the Constantine dynasty, the majority of the issues belong, though, to the period after 364. In the Brigetio find in question, though, the issues of the Constantine dynasty are in majority, which fact corroborates our hypothesis, namely that the find must have been originally much larger, a part of the coins, consisting of Valentinian age mints, having been lost. This would explain the stoppage of the coinage after 372. Coins from the years between 372 and 374 are scarce in other contemporaneous hoards as well. The find consists of coins in such a poor state of preservation that only about a third of them could be assigned to certain mints. The distribution according to mints gives the usual picture, as shown on our table. The 198 coins analyzable come in their bulk from Eastern mints. 60,1 per cent of the coins analyzed was struck in Siscia, 7,57 per cent in Aquileia, 7,11 per cent in Rome, resp. Constantinople. To the remaining mints less than ten coins each fall. To sum up the above, the nearer provenance of the Brigetio coin hoard is unknown. Its last issues were struck in 372. This date is much earlier than the last issues of the nearly contemporaneous coin finds, enumerated above. This early date of the burying is not explained by Pannonian events, nor by the excavations, conducted in Brigetio, either. As the find is incomplete, there is a possiblity that the mints between 372 and 374 were lost; or if we maintain this early date for the burying of the hoard, there is a possible explanation for it, namely that a soldier, commanded with his unit from Pannónia to Africa in order to crush the revolt of Firmus, broken out in 373, had hidden our hoard. története az őskortól a honfoglalásig. (History of Budapest from the Prehistoric Age till the Hungarian Conquest.) In: Budapest Története. I. (Bp. 1973) 110.