Finding a Lost Emperor in a Clay Pot October 11, 2005 by Alexander Benenson Images courtesy the Ashmolean Museum Forget stone, a discovery of a Roman coin in Britain proves history is set in bronze and silver. During the chaos and confusion of the third century A.D., amid widespread disease, famine, and barbarian invasions, a brazen upstart seizes control of a breakaway state within the Roman Empire. He proclaims himself emperor only to disappear days later, his life and story lost, save for only the briefest of remarks in two fragmentary and unreliable sources. Then, an amateur treasure hunter scanning the green fields of Oxfordshire with a metal detector chances upon a small clay pot filled with more than 5,000 ancient Roman coins. A British Museum archaeologist brushing away centuries of corrosion and carefully picking apart bronze and silver pieces, discovers one exceedingly strange coin. Among the thousands of unremarkable ones, this coin carries an unfamiliar bearded face, a perplexing name, Domitianus, and most strikingly, the three letters IMP, short for imperator, or emperor. Suddenly, the hunt was on for another coin, this one found not buried in the ground, but buried in the archives of a small provincial museum in southern France. The French coin, dug up in 1900, was deemed worthless at the time, a modern counterfeit depicting what was surely a made up emperor. Amazingly, the portrait on the supposed fake matches the strange coin in the British Museum, as does the image on the reverse side. Small characteristic markings provide the final confirmation; both coins had been struck from the same die or stamp. The French coin is not a fake, and the bearded man, not an imposter, but a lost emperor. It sounds like the plot to the latest bestseller, but it's not. The characters, including the lost emperor, are all real. Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality. Iraq Kingdom, Part 2: Proof Coins. Focuses on the excessively rare proof strikes of the same coins. Completing this set is probably wishful thinking. The treasure hunter is Brian Malin, a local resident of Oxfordshire, who had found a similar sized hoard just miles away in 1989, and donated it to the nearby Ashmolean Museum. In the late 1980s, when England had no coherent strategy encouraging the reporting of such finds, and every year, thousands of coins were dug up and sold without being recorded, Malin's gift was extraordinary. Since then, Britain has instituted the, which lays down specific rules for the treatment and sale of ancient coins. It legally binds treasure hunters to report any find of more than two coins of gold or silver over 300 years old. If the find is deemed significant, British museums are given the chance to purchase the coins at fair market value. Innotab games walmart. Malin found the Domitianus coin in a second hoard, also from Chalgrove, which is ten miles southeast of Oxford, in 2003. Because the Domitianus coin was found fused together with thousands of other coins, all inside a Roman clay jar, its authenticity was unquestionable. As the story reached the press, the coin became source of national pride. The British paper The Times printed a picture of the coin with the caption 'Is this Britain's Lost Emperor?' Archaeologists and historians were quick to temper some of the sensationalism, noting that it was highly unlikely that Domitianus, who had probably been confined to a region in southwest Germany near the Danube, had ever even seen Britain, and that the coin had made its way to Oxfordshire via trade routes or troop movements. Even so, the discovery of the coin created a buzz throughout academic circles in Britain. Christopher Howgego, the curator of ancient coins at the Ashmolean, told reporters that, 'the coin is one of the most interesting Roman objects ever found in Britain.'
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