Folia archeologica 28.
Katalin Bíro-Sey: Római pénzek egykorú hamisítványai a Niklovits gyűjteményből
92 К. BÍRÓ-SEY From the ' 'barbarian" coins of Niklovits we have now chosen a part consisting of counterfeit coins of Roman Empire mints. The Hungarian National Museum had already a fine collection of contemporary forgeries of Roman coins, published partly by Ödön Göhl, later in two major comprehensive studies by András Alföldi. During the past decades this section of the collection has not been enriched except for a few new accessions. The most important acquisition is this sequence from the Niklovits Collection, which was, though, a regrettable want, namely that in the notes of Niklovits we have not found any clues as for the find places of the coins. We succeeded in identifying some specimens with pieces in the one-time Kilényi Collection, so the fake of a reduced follis of Licinius I (Cat. No. 12), that of a reduced follis of Licinius II (Cat. No. 13), and two counterfeits of a reduced follis minted for the family of Constantine the Great, with the reverse VIRTVS EXERCIT (Cat. Nos. 19, 20). The identification was made possibly by the catalogue of the Kilényi Collection, composed by Károly Szentgáli in 1917, now in the manuscript collection of the Numismatic Collection, 2 where the author gives a detailed description or an exact classification of the more than one thousand Celtic, Greek, Roman and medieval coins as well as of the modern coins and medals, both Hungarian and foreign. The handwritten catalogue has not been published, only a short survey of the whole of the collection was issued in print by Szentgáli in vol. 1918 of the Numizmatikai Közlöny, containing the description, classification and data of some unpublished coins, mainly Celtic and Roman. The coin collection of the Hungarian National Museum embraced also previously contemporary fakes of Roman imperial coins, which are, in their greatest part, published in the mentioned papers of Göhl 3 and Alföldi. 4 The work of András Alföldi was a collection of materials. He not only dealt with the counterfeits in the Medal Cabinet of the Hungarian National Museum, but with items in the collection of the Reformed Church in Debrecen, further with those in public collections of Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris and Zagreb, as well as in various Hungarian and foreign private collections, so with the coins of a similar character in the collections Viczay, Weszerle, Unger, Trau and Weber. The 24 counterfeit coins after Roman Imperial mints of the Niklovits Collection serve as a completion of this great collection of materials. Alföldi has, though, elaborated only the fakes of 4th century bronze and gold coins and did not deal with counterfeit denarii from the first to second centuries. It is rather an arbitrary segregation dealing now only with fakes of the Imperial period. Counterfeiting - or copying - Roman coins did not begin in this area with the occupation of Transdanubia and the creation of the province Pannónia: it had started as early as the contacts of the Eravisci with the Romans, which made the Eravisci to copy Roman denarii and mark these copies with the name of their tribe. These coins are, though, counted among the Celtic coinage. We will not 2 S?entgáli, K., Kilényi Hugó régipénz- és éremgyűjteménye. (The coin and medal collection of Hugó Kilényi.) Budapest, July 15 - Sept. 30. 1917. 114 handwritten pages. 3 Göhl, О., NK 3(1904) 7., NK 5(1906) 90. 4 Alföldi, A., NK 25(1926) 37., NK 26-27(1927-28) 59.
