bavarikon4UCeltic Coins
At the beginning of the Latène period, in c.500 BC, the Celts are usually considered as the inhabitants of the Bavarian foothills of the Alps. From the second century BC dawned the period of the so-called oppida civilisation. Under the protection of an extensive defensive wall, a concentration of the population with a strict division of labour took place within the oppida, the first cities in Central Europe. The oppidum in the area of today's Manching near Ingolstadt is regarded as one of the most important and largest of those early cities. In this society, which had become more complex, pre-monetary forms of payment, which had been in use for a long time, were gradually replaced by coins minted in accordance to the Mediterranean model.
Although the Celts were connected by a largely uniform language and culture, they were not organised in "states" but politically fragmented into local tribes. Consequently, the Celtic coinage was not uniform, but very diverse in its organisation and appearance within the Celtic world. An inscription of the Augustan victory monument of La Turbie (France) allocated the Celts settled in today's southern Bavaria to the tribe of the Vindelics around the turn of eras. However, this allocation cannot easily be transferred to the last third of the third century BC, when the minting of coins began in today's southern Bavaria with a gold coin weighing only about 0.35g. This 1/24-stater with the head of Janus on the obverse was still strongly oriented on Roman models, while the rest of the Celtic world preferred Greek coin motifs.
From the last third of the second century B.C. onwards, the Celts increasingly minted coins in today’s south of Bavaria, which in their coin images, partly looking abstract, partly naïve up to modern, give an impression of Celtic art in the late Latène period. Among them were, in particular, the so-called "rainbow cups". After heavy thunderstorms, these bowl-shaped coins might occasionally be unearthed on the fields and thus - with some luck - be clearly visible to any finder. In the course of time, the (popular) belief developed that coins always appear on the spot where a rainbow starts. The coin motifs from the world of Celtic mythology and religion as well as from the (aristocratic) world are occasionally difficult to interpret. This problem is not least due to the fact that the Celts left no written evidence behind.
The other part collections of "Coins of the Ancient World" available on bavarikon
>> This collection is part of the holdings of "Coins of the Ancient World" of the Staatliche Münzsammlung München (State Coin Collection Munich).