International Treasure Mary Beard article about "Newly Discovered Roman Emperor"

[WarGamer]

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/when-is-a-roman-emperor-not-an-emperor-sponsian-blog-post-mary-beard/

Link to tweet

Yeah, I love Mary Beard.

BTW this is why Twitter is so valuable. How else can one follow arguments and opinions and debate between world class scientists, historians and archaeologists??? Basically in real time...

Oh and my Twitter account has ZERO appearances by MAGATS or any politics AT ALL because the Twitter AI knows what interests me.

For background, heres an article where scientists say "Yup, Sponsian was real"

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63636641

Prof Paul Pearson University College London, who led the research, told BBC News that he was astonished by the discovery.

"What we have found is an emperor. He was a figure thought to have been a fake and written off by the experts.

"But we think he was real and that he had a role in history."

[pansypoo53219]

1. cool. very cool. he has a cool helmet.

[DFW]

2. I can understand the skepticism.

The enlargement of the coin shows the "scratches" to appear raised, i.e. in the die that struck them, and not from circulation. Also, they stop at raised figures (letters, e.g.) and start again after them, indicating that the letters were punched or carved into the die AFTER the die scratches were on there. There could still be arguments for this coin to be a genuine 3rd century item, but there are at least as many arguments against it.

As for Dacia's isolation from the rest of the Roman empire, this is indeed well documented. It is one of the reasons that Romanian, while a "Latin" language, is so far removed from the rest of them as to be unintelligible for native speakers of the western Latin languages, such as Portuguese, Catalan, Italisn, Spanish and French. Today's Romania encompasses what was Dacia--check out the brand name of their locally made cars.

(And now a word from our Sponsian.......)