Byzantium · Mid-6th century AD · Phanagoria, Krasnodar Krai, Russia
Lost wallets with counterfeit coins found in 6th-century fire layer at Phanagoria, Russia
Coins dropped as residents fled a blaze of AD 545–554 include bronze staters minted two centuries earlier and local fakes struck from a single die.
Peer-reviewed paper
Phanagoria, Russia Archaeologists at Phanagoria, on the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia, have found the contents of at least four wallets. Their owners dropped them during a destructive fire in the mid-6th century AD. The small clusters of coins held bronze staters minted more than 200 years before the fire. They also held counterfeits, which the researchers think were made locally shortly before the city was destroyed.
The finds come from excavations in 2023 and 2024 in the city's Lower Town. Mikhail Abramzon and Sergey Ostapenko published them in Brief Communications of the Institute of Archaeology (KSIA). This is the journal of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A burnt quarter dated by a coin and a historian
The wallets lay in a destruction layer dated to between AD 545 and 554. A coin minted under the emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) gives the layer its terminus post quem. That is the date before which the layer cannot have formed. The historian Procopius of Caesarea describes the destruction of Phanagoria and nearby cities in his Wars, and the archaeological and written evidence agree closely.
The same fire destroyed a synagogue complex, the utility buildings around it and a Jewish quarter. Excavators also found many stone projectiles nearby. These were probably shot from siege engines.
These details suggest the fire was part of a military assault rather than an accident. Residents may have taken refuge inside the synagogue walls as the city was attacked.
The wallets themselves have not survived. They were probably made of leather or fabric. What remained were tight clusters of coins lying where they fell, each with between three and ten bronze staters.
These were small sums. The researchers take them as the money of ordinary townspeople, not the elite.
Old coins still in use, and local forgeries
Phanagoria had belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom since the 5th century BC. The kingdom stopped minting bronze staters around AD 341–342. Yet coins of the kings Rhadamsades, Thothorses and Rhescuporis VI were still in people's purses two centuries later.
The long circulation points to a local money system that kept working. Perhaps new coin was hard to come by, or people trusted familiar currency. The study also illustrates a stater with an engraver's error in the king's name.
One wallet held counterfeits. They copy the staters of Rhescuporis VI, but their portraits are crude and their inscriptions misspelled. All of them appear to have been struck with the same die. That points to production in one place, probably not long before the fire.
The authors read the forgeries as a sign of economic strain in the city's last decades. In their view, official coin was in short supply or central control was weakening.
The new date matters for the wider region. Similar imitations had been assigned to the mid-4th century. The Phanagoria finds move their production into the 6th century. The study compares the new pieces with an imitation from excavations in Phanagoria's Upper Town and with examples in published catalogues of Bosporan coins.
Greek colonists founded Phanagoria in the 6th century BC. It lay between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and became the administrative centre of the Bosporan Kingdom's Asian territories. The city survived into the early medieval period. After the mid-6th-century destruction, however, the site was largely abandoned for about 130 years.
When it was reoccupied, it was under the Khazar Khaganate. The Khazar elite gave Judaism an official status. A new settlement grew up over the ruins of the old Jewish quarter.
The city ceased to exist in the early 10th century. That was around the time the Kievan Rus' prince Oleg of Novgorod campaigned against the Khazars.
Sources
- 6th-Century Fire in Phanagoria Reveals Lost Wallets Filled with Ancient Coins—Including Counterfeits (Arkeonews)
Paper: Abramzon, M.G. and Ostapenko, S.N. Brief Communications of the Institute of Archaeology (KSIA), issue 281, Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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