BÍRÓ-SEY KATALIN: COINS FROM IDENTIFIED SITES OF BRIGETIO AND THE QUESTION OF LOCAL CURRENCY / Régészeti Füzetek II/18. (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Budapest, 1977)

I. INTRODUCTION

yearly value. In order to show value, each kind of money would have had to by reduced to a common base, to aureus, denarius, or sestertius in order to express yearly value. The value graph should reflect the pulse of the currency and not the evaluation by number.I

4 The variety of provenance of the coins causes also problems in their evaluation. The coins originate from private collections, excavations, special public collections, and from country museums respectively. In my opinion each collection was gathered by individual, subjective points of view. These points of view naturally influenced the proportoin of the collected material. A private collector looks mainly at the condition of the coins. Some follow a pattern of obtaining at least one coin of each emperor, for the collection. Both men, Ödön Káliay and György Lenhardt were collectors with a certain historical view, but they were most definitely influenced by the bad condition of the coins of the 4th century A. D. , thus they included less of these in their collections than their rate of incidence.^ There are two statistical data to prove this point. Although we put the Lenhardt-Káiiay collection, including the material from excavations, and the literature, into the "scattered coinage" category, before their merging, we prepared their graph, (Fig. XVI) which, if compared with the graph of scattered coins from excavations and literature (Fig. XVII) and the find from the Tussla collection (Find. No. VIII, Fig. XIII) we can see that there is a great difference in yearly average numbers between the LenhardtKállay collection and the other two mentioned categories after 375 A.D. Although the Tussla material was also a private collection it could be considered intact sine e the coins were practically in one block before the restorer of the numismatic department separated. Thus when they were collected no subjective views could be applied. Evaluating the impressions of the Lenhardt collection between 375 and 383 A.D. the yearly average number of coins stays under I, between 383 and 388 A.D. it becomes 1, then later it falls back again to the previous level. Between 395 and 4o8 A.D. o, 1 expresses the yearly average. In spite of this, Find No. VIII shows a yearly average of thirteen between 375 and 378 A.D. But this is not a quite reliable picture, because this high number results from the fact that in the case of those Valens and Gratian impressions, where the mintmark was not legible, we took the full duration of their reigns respectively. After the death of Valens until 383 A.D. the yearly average stays under I in this collection. Between 383 and 395 A.D. the average number varies between 5-3, and until 4o2 A.D. it reaches sometimes 2. These results are considerably higher than in the LenhardtKállay collection. But this is a hoard, and these results, as we have seen before, may be biased. But the graph if the truly spontaneous scattered coins (Fig XVII) still comes closer to these latter results. The yearly average of 3 coins between 375 and 383 A.D. shows a slowly decreasing tendency, then after 383 A.D. it falls back to 2. By the and of the 380s, and the beginning of the 390s A.D. the average is 3 again, but from this time on it falls under I again until 423 A.D. According to these two paralieils we can say, that there certainly has been a collector' s subjectivity in the gathering of the Lenhardt-Kállay collection. To get a true picture of the currency of Brigetio we must approach the problem through the Tussla find (Find. No. VIII) and the scattered coins. The material from public collections, like that of the Numismatic Department of t^he Hungarian National Museum also show the marks of subjectivity. For many years the