This has been the accepted view until now. Coins from the hoard were dismissed as fakes because of the way they looked.

However, from the mid-19th century, attitudes changed. When the coins were discovered in the early 18th century, they were thought to be genuine and classed alongside other imitations of Roman coins made beyond the fringes of the empire. Recognising this and unable to receive official issues from the mint in Rome, Sponsian seems to have authorised the creation of locally produced coins, some featuring an image of his face, to support a functioning economy in his isolated frontier territory. Surrounded by enemies, Sponsian may have been a local army officer forced to assume supreme command during a period of chaos and civil war, protecting the military and civilian population of Dacia until order was restored, and the province evacuated between 271 and 275 CE.Ĭoinage has always been an important symbol of power and authority. Archaeological studies have established that the area was cut off from the rest of the Roman empire in around 260 CE. The Roman province of Dacia, a territory overlapping with modern-day Romania, was a region prized for its gold mines. Our evidence suggests he ruled Roman Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost, at a time when the empire was beset by civil wars and the borderlands were overrun by plundering invaders.” Pearson (UCL Earth Sciences) said: “Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity. The team also found a pattern of wear and tear that suggested the coin had been in active circulation. These minerals were cemented in place by silica – cementing that would naturally occur over a long time in soil. They found minerals on the coin’s surface that were consistent with it being buried in soil over a long period of time, and then exposed to air. In the new study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers compared the Sponsian coin with other Roman coins kept at The Hunterian, including two that are known to be genuine. They have been regarded as fakes since the mid-19 th-century, due to their crude, strange design features and jumbled inscriptions. The coin, housed at The Hunterian collection at the University of Glasgow, was among a handful of coins of the same design unearthed in Transylvania, in present-day Romania, in 1713. A gold coin long dismissed as a forgery appears to be authentic and depicts a long-lost Roman emperor named Sponsian, according to a new UCL-led study.

Lost power of the ancients