Trier: Museum shows Gold Hoard Find

Twenty years ago, on 9 September 1993, a treasure was found in downtown Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany): More than 2,600 ancient Roman gold coins were unearthed at a construction site in the – once Roman – inner city. Now all coins can be seen in an exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum.

It was amateur archeologists who found the treasure – gold coins from the time roughly between 50 and 200 AD. They depict about 40 Roman emperors and family members, and have a total weight of 18.5 kilograms. Many of them have been part of the museum’s permanent exhibition, others had to be researched, and now they are finally reunited so to say.

This was not a “private” treasure though that somebody had hidden. Trier was an important city in the Roman Empire. (For a while, late third/early fourth century, it was even an imperial residence and the biggest Roman city north of the Alps.) And the hoard was probably some kind of safe used by Roman administration officials. Its value was about the annual salary of 200 legionaries.