Folia archeologica 28.

Katalin Bíro-Sey: Római pénzek egykorú hamisítványai a Niklovits gyűjteményből

ROMAN COUNTERFEIT COINS 93 touch here the coin circulation of Transylvania during the Roman Republican age and the copying of coins during this period either. Among the counterfeit coins of the Imperial period of the Niklovits bequest there are six items of copies after Augustean denarii (Cat. Nos. 1-6), each of them was made after the obverse and reverse of the denarius type Cohen 43. As for its design and legend, denarius No. 1 is still very near to the original piece. The representation of No. 2, especially that of the obverse, is barbarizing, the letters of the legends are deteriorated into unidentifiable signs. On the obverse of the denarii Nos. 3 and 4 the head is looking left; there is no original denarius with head looking left. The legend cannot be called even an imitation of letters, so it is not possible stating whether the head is looking left for the reason that the diesinker copied the mirror image and not the reversed design of the original denarius, cutting it negatively into the die. This can be stated only in the case when we are able to recognize an intellegible text. Although the obverse of the counterfeit denarii Nos. 5 and 6 there are again heads looking right, on the reverse, however, the legend which on the original specimen goes round, even running out into the exergue, is shrunken into some letter-like signs on the right and left of the reverse and in the exergue. The jagged but all the same pronounced representation of the obverse of the denarius No. 6 is near to the obverse of the counterfeits in the collection of the British Museum.

3 The imitations of Augustean denarii differ from their prototypes as for their weight; the official weight of these for this time is given in 3,95 grams, the counterfeit ones have a range of weights from 3,1 to 3,7 grams, the denarius No. 6 even weighs as little as 2,15 grams. The original denarii were struck between 2 B.C. and 14 A.D. Also the bronze coin (Cat. No. 7) was struck after an Augustean coin - dupondius or as - its legend is, though, so confused that an identification of the Roman coin which served for the ground type, is not possible. During the reign of Augustus this type was struck for C. Cassius Celer, С. Plotius Rufus and later for Tiberius. As it cannot be identified with any of the coins of either of these mintmasters, we are not able to give a fixed date for it, except for the fact that it is a copy of a bronze coin struck during the reign of Augustus. It is counted among the rarities; the Hungarian National Museum did not own, till now, a similar specimen. It is an interesting fact, though, that copies after Augustean denarii are represented in a relatively great number in this small part of the collection as well as in the Numismatic Collection of the Hungarian National Museum, as a whole, while Augustean denarii very rarely come to light, either as stray finds, or in hoards. Except the Lágymányos hoard we know of no great coin hoards in Transdanubia comprising Augustean denarii. It is a well-known fact that in Pannónia the infiltration of coins can be called money-circulation only from the 5 Mattingly, H. M. A., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum I. (London 1923) Pl. XIV, 5-7. Two similar counterfeit Augustus denarii occur in the hoard, found at Kecel in 1934: Jónás, Ei., Die sarmatisch-jazygischen Münzen der Ungarischen Tiefebene und ihre Beziehungen zu Südrußland. I. (Bp. 1935) figs. 1-2. One of the denarii weighed 2,97 grams, the other 3,28 grams. In this paper the author mentions that the Niklovits Collection embraces a significant number of counterfeit denarii: op. cit. 6., n. 19.