How to read Iron Age Coins | Curator’s Corner S10 Ep3

Today I'm going to tell you about an Iron Age person called Esunertos. I bet you've

never heard of them, because until a few months ago neither had we! So welcome to

the Department of Money and Medals, we have a big collection of coins and we have around

10,000 Iron Age coins in our collection, and the most recent one that's just joined the

collection is this one here. This is a quarter stater of Esunertos. So this coin is important

because it is some of the first writing we have from Britain. To understand this coin

we're going to go right back to the beginnings of coinage in Iron Age Britain. We're going

to look at how the designs were developed and transformed over time and finally we're going

to look at how they started putting writing on the coins, like this coin here. I'm Eleanor Ghey,

I'm a curator of hoards at the British Museum, welcome to my corner. [Music]

So what is a stater? This is the main gold denomination used in Iron Age Britain. It

was originally a Greek denomination and it has a fairly standard weight it's produced in many

of the coin producing regions of Britain. Some regions also produce a fraction of it,

which we call a quarter stater - roughly a quarter of the weight of a stater, and that's what this

coin is here. People often think that the stater was derived from a particular stater of Philip II

of Macedon who was the father of Alexander the Great and this was issued in the Greek world in

the 4th century BCE. We know that these coins travelled great distances and eventually came

over the Alps and were seen by people living north of the Mediterranean. As Northern Europe

comes into contact with Southern Europe, is part of a process of social transformation,

cultural transformation. What we now know as Celtic art, which is the art style used by

what I'm calling Iron Age people is developing, particularly in the northern part of Europe. So

they have their own artistic vocabulary which is taking some of these motifs and riffing on

them and developing them and transforming them in such incredible creative ways, these coins

really are miniature works of art. They would been made by striking a blank flan of gold,

blank piece of metal between two engraved dies and the die engraving was done with incredible skill,

particularly when you see how small some of the coins are. [Music]

The head is of Apollo. It's very beautiful in its original incarnation, beautiful classical

depiction of a deity with curly hair, with a laurel wreath. And on the reverse there's a

chariot with a charioteer and it says Filippou below it, or Philip in Greek letters. And you

can see here we're going from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE. It's fairly recognizably

still a head of Apollo in this coin. But here this coin has been designed by somebody who

didn't want to use a Greek inscription, but has sort of used the idea of an inscription when

they've made this coin. So what says Filippou in Greek on this coin is a series of dots,

but it's standing in for where the inscription was. It's still got a high level of artistry,

all these coins do. As we go further into Gaul, by Gaul I mean ancient Iron Age France, we have

this coin which shows a real elaboration of the curls of the hair, you see each hair is curling,

we still got this laurel wreath, it's still very recognizably still a head of Apollo. But on the

reverse crazy things are happening! So we have a horse, it's the same familiar horse that we

have on the chariot in this coin, but it's a single horse and it has a human head. Horses