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Author Topic: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)  (Read 734 times)

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Offline Heliodromus

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Nicely made documentary here on a recent (20m deep!) river find in the Rhone river by Constantinian Arles. Includes some great computer generated imagery of Arles and period reenactment.

It's in French, but you can enable auto-translated closed captioning via YouTube's settings. Translation quality is poor but good enough to follow the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa0Uo1JYuZs

One of the finds is this large unlisted medallion of Constantine II - picture attached from screen grab. It seems similar size to the 37-39mm silver "vicennelia" (actually iterregnum) medallions that it's shown beside at the end, so I'm guessing it's 6 solidi. Bust style doesn't seem a good match for the 335 TSE (C1 tricennalia) issue, so perhaps issued for Constantine II's decennalia in 327 AD.

Ben

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #1 on: April 02, 2021, 04:13:47 pm »
I'm surprised no-one has commented on this one yet !

Yes, it's in French, and it's long (1hr 30min), but very interesting! Try it, you'll like it! Money-back guarantee !

Here's how you can change the closed-captioning subtitles to the language of your choice.

1) Click on link above to start YouTube, then click on little "cog" Settings icon in bottom right of player window.

2) In Settings pop-up menu, click on "Subtitles/CC"

3) In Subtitles pop-up menu, click on "Auto-translate"

4) In Auto-translate pop-up menu, select the language you want the subtitles in (Latin, perhaps ?!)

5) Enjoy your (crappy, but adequate) auto-translated subtitles !

Ben

Offline Merinda

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #2 on: April 02, 2021, 08:18:28 pm »
Thanks for the link Ben, about a 1/3 of the way through - had to have a break and lie down after seeing the ‘conservation’ technique being used on the coins :-)

More seriously is there a published list of the coins ? They seem to have been found together so presumably were a single find, but there seems to be a quite a range in dates from the glimpses shown?



Allan

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #3 on: April 02, 2021, 09:12:05 pm »
Hi Allan,

Yes the "conservation" technique is rather horrific! I've seen YouTube videos of people who know what they are doing cleaning with a scalpel, and binocular microscope, but this guy might as well be using a screwdriver. I could see using a harsher method, chemical cleaning perhaps, on the small bronzes (~1000 of them apparently), but you'd have thought the silver medallions - visibly scratched - would deserve better!

I tried a few google searches and havn't been able to come up with any list of coins or published report. There's a Trajan aureus visible, which they also mention as an outlier, but everything else seems to be from time of Constantine or shortly after his death in 337-340. They mention all the coins being before 340.

It's an interesting assembly of items, but I assume they do belong together.

At the end of the video they remove any markers from the site to prevent looting, and seem to be intending to return again later. There's a museum in Arles, with a numismatic collection, who'd probably know whether anything has yet been published.

Ben

Offline Merinda

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #4 on: April 02, 2021, 09:47:59 pm »
Thanks Ben - yes, the close up of the scalpel work showed more coin than corrosion breaking off!

The commentary says that the ship sank between 337-340 presumably based on the coins, but I think I saw a GLORIA ROMANORVM reverse, so after 364. I need to improve my French, the translation works well enough to get a broad sense of the meaning, but any nuance is definitely lost.

Allan

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #5 on: April 02, 2021, 11:31:31 pm »
Quote
I need to improve my French, the translation works well enough to get a broad sense of the meaning, but any nuance is definitely lost.

Same here - not sure that my highschool French really added much to the subtitles. One detail I didn't get is the composition of the "bronze" ingots; the screen of the (X-Ray fluorescence) device they were using displayed the top three most plentiful elements as "Cu 54%, Cl 17%, Pb 14%" but the translated subtitles only mentioned the copper and lead. 17% Cl (Chlorine) doesn't make much sense, but I'm not sure how to interpret what looked like "Cl" as Tin or Zinc.

There seem to have been three disjoint aspects to the cargo:

- the silver (10 = 15-20Kg total) and "bronze" (20 = 500Kg total) ingots
- the donative items (large gold medallion, Constantinian solidi, silver medallions, gold belt buckle)  (maybe personal property of someone hitching a ride with the shipment?)
- the ~1000 nummi + aureus

The silver and bronze may have been headed for the nearby mint, which is why the alloy composition is interesting. The mints were all by rivers for ease of transportation, so receiving raw materials in this way would not be surprising. At first glance the quantities seem too low for a "mint delivery", but given the 23 nearby wrecks they mentioned and that this boat had easily taken on water with this size of load, maybe this was about the limit of an individual delivery? 500Kg of bronze would be about 1500 roman pounds, or ~150,000 coins at 1/96lb, but I recently read a production estimate of ~50,000 coins per day from a single officina, so that would only equate to three days production.

Ben

Offline Lech Stępniewski

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Re: Le trésor du Rhone (documentary on Constantinian Arles river find)
« Reply #6 on: April 03, 2021, 09:01:09 am »
but I think I saw a GLORIA ROMANORVM reverse, so after 364.

You are right, Allan. They have shown only the reverse but it is probably Valens.

BTW, very interesting movie. Thank you Ben for sharing!

Lech Stępniewski
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Poland

 

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