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Der spätrömisch-frühbyzantinische Münzfund von Firtosváralja (Siebenbürgen, 1831) im Lichte neuentdeckter Archivdaten

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Somogyi P.

Acta Archaeologica Carpathica

2016

vol. LI

169-255

Within the confines of the small Szekely village of Firtosváralja, on the Firtos Mountain, rising a thousand meters above sea level, a large quantity of Byzantine gold coins was found in 1831. Later these coins were sold out by their discoverers. Given this, it is hardly surprising that a hundred years later only sixteen specimens of coins from this hoard could have been identified. Since 1960, three more gold coins, kept in the Numismatic Cabinet of the National History Museum of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, have been identified as belonging to this modest collection. Although the coin assemblage from Firtosváralja entered scholarly literature and has repeatedly come up in issues of concerning the early medieval settlement history of Transylvania, there has been no source study relating either to the discovery of the hoard or to the coins themselves. After years of archival research in Romania and Hungary, it was now possible to track down some of the contemporary official reports on the find, which capture the true history of the discovery of the gold coins. It was also found that already in the mid-nineteenth century, several scholars from Transylvania dealt intensively with the hoard investigated here. Many descriptions and illustrations of hitherto unknown coins from Firtosváralja are among the preserved legacy of these researchers. Thus, the number of coins for which we now have a full set of data, or at least the information about the issuer, increased to 54 pieces. Eleven gold coins preserved to this day in the museums of Székelyudvarhely and Cluj as well as other issuances known thanks to pencil frottage drawings or wax impressions allow to describe precisely the group of coins of our interest here. The detailed analysis of the oldest information about the hoard proves that associating of the solidi of Emperor Maurice (582–602) and Heraclius (610–641) with the hoard from Firtosváralja is ambiguous; hence the issuances by Justinian the Great (527–565) are the youngest coins from this set. This means that the gold coins accumulated here since the 430s are likely to have been deposited much earlier than previously assumed. Based on this new-early-dating, an interpretation, hitherto not offered, of the late Roman-early Byzantine coin hoard of Firtosváralja is also presented.

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1 Acta Archaeologica Carpathica

1 Somogyi P.

1 2016

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Der spätrömisch-frühbyzantinische Münzfund von Firtosváralja (Siebenbürgen, 1831) im Lichte neuentdeckter Archivdaten