Philip de Jersey: Major Rybot’s “intruders” - an enigmatic Iron Age coinage

Um, thank you very much for asking me over from the other place.

Um, my name perhaps uh gets me a uh uh a look over here. Um, it's very, very kind of you. Um, I, um. I mean, obviously I was going to talk about coins in some capacity.

It's almost unavoidable, um, and, but when I was asked to speak, I thought it's the Societe. It's a celebration of the Societe. So let's look at a particular type of coinage which in the numismatic world is um, Is totally associated with one of your very illustrious past presidents, Major Ribo, Major Norman Ribo. So I'm gonna whistle through 20 minutes about um a particularly puzzling coinage that that has puzzled me and others for a long time. Um Now, the um The sort of the genesis of this was the discovery of the Maronry horde in 1935, which until the Cati, well, until the second Lecatiion horde in 2012 was by far the biggest Iron Age horde ever found, about about 12,000 coins.

We're we're never going to know the exact figure because undoubtedly Some of them got um sort of taken away by sightseers and were given away and left on the side of the trench and all sorts of reasons like that. But roughly 12,000 coins. And, um, Major Ribo, Norman Ribo, who was, um, at this time, uh, just coming up to his 60th birthday, I think. Uh, just before he was 60, um, got hold of the coins and spent a long time studying them. He, he produced this remarkable report. Uh, he, I mean, he was, he was a brilliant artist, uh, there is no other word for it. Um, and, um. As part of the report, he, he drew about 180 illustrations of the coins.

He, he goes into some detail in the report about how he actually did it. He, he, he, he blew them up, traced them at 4 times actual size or something, and then reduced them. So he did about 1 a day for 6 months, um, which, given Uh, as I get closer and closer to 60, how my eyesight seems to diminish on a daily basis, can't have been very good for his, I don't think. Um, but he, he produced these fantastic illustrations and They have to be Um, I mean, we look at them now in a slightly different way. They are, how can I put it, they are sort of scientifically, they are numismatically problematic because what he was doing was, as he says there, he's sort of combining um features that he could see on different coins. Um, so when it comes to actually talking about individual dyes, as people like me do, we start running into problems because these are Uh, these are sort of almost like best of illustrations. They're not absolutely strict representations of, of individual coins by and large, and that creates a sort of problem in the study, but they are, they need to be appreciated and accepted as absolutely beautiful works of art in their own right. What he was showing primarily were status of the Coosoliti. And they formed almost the entire contents of of the Maronary horde, almost all the 12,000, and there's examples of the actual, the actual coins in the what are widely recognised as the six classes, 654 and then 132 is the rather confusing chronological order of them.

Um, but as well as those nearly 12,000 coins in the horde, there were 8 coins that, uh, Maribo singled out as intruders because they were clearly different to, uh, the bulk of the coinage, and Some of these, about 3 of them, we can sort of move, we can take away from from what I want to talk about in the next few minutes.

The 2 on the top are um probably uh coins of the biocassis from Bahia in the region of Bayer in Normandy and um the bottom right, um. The attribution is problematic of these, but the Atui around Aranche is is the one with the lyre on its cheek at the bottom right. So we can, um, oh, actually I've got a map just to remind you where where we're talking about. Um, we can take away those three, and that leaves. The 5 intruders, Ribo's intruders, and they, uh, as I've described there, they usually got the head facing right, um, usually with a boar um up in the hair here, but just occasionally with a lyre in the same place, and then the human headed horse, which is an absolutely um dominant feature on the Iron Age coinage of Armorica of Brittany and Normandy throughout most of the late Iron Age period. And beneath it, the liar, um, in a vertical position, that's the thing that. Really sort of uh differentiates this, this little group of coins from all the others.

Now, when Ribo was not, um, as he as he freely admits, he wasn't sort of trained in archaeology or numismatics, he was looking at these things from a Um, uh, uh, from an artistic perspective, by and large, uh, and he certainly didn't look into the sort of antecedents or any previous work on, on these particular coins. He just classified them as intruders. In fact, they had been recorded um for, for quite some time previously before, before Ribo got his hands on the Mark Andre examples, and one of the earliest. Sort of useful um Celtic works on Gaulish or Celtic coinage published in 1840. He has what is clearly an example of the ribo intruder, or one of the ribo intruders type illustrated back then. There's a modern, if you like modern example, a recent example from the Cati, which is clearly the same type of coinage. So Lulu had seen one somewhere, he doesn't give a provenance for it by 1840. And in 1864, a chap called Edward, uh, Edouard Lambert, who, who published his, um, essays, there'd been an 1844 volume and then rather confusingly an 1864 volume of exactly the same title. Um, he had, uh, other examples. He had 2 quarter status, the smaller ones, and stater, and in this case he had a couple of fine spots near near Salo in the department of Mons. So they, they were known, uh, but not known at all well. The, um, The The, I mean, the main figure, I mean the main figure to exclusion of almost anybody else, um, Jean Baptiste Colbert de Boule in working on Iron Age numismatics after the Second World War, he absolutely dominated the field for for about 40 years. He barely makes any reference to Uh, the, these intruders, he, he talks of them as the, uh, coins of the American people next to the Coriosilliti and attributes them to the Yelli and the Abukui, and that's just about the only time he ever mentioned them. Um, they have turned up elsewhere now and again.

Uh, there's one in the Muse de Breton in Rennes that's been there since 1949, but without a fine spot and a Parisian dealer CGB had one for sale a few years ago which somewhere on there says this example came from the old stock of a Belgian dealer. Um, but no, no further information on its, um, fine spot.

So they've really been a bit of a mystery, um, for quite a long time, um, since, since sort of well before Ribo saw the Marhondri ones and up till very recently. I'm sure most of you have seen plenty of pictures of this by now.

Um, the Ca2 gives us uh a sort of renewed opportunity to look at these, these intruders in a bit more detail because there are about 100 of them, just under 100, um, 71 staters and 27 quarter status. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ignore that. Quarter status, um, really just focus on, on the status, um, for the rest of this, um, talk, um. And I, as the coins came up, were clean, cleaned off the hor and uh I got to see the images.

I, I sort of built up a rough and initial classification of these um sort of very much temporary or provisional work on them. And so I have whatever it is, 5, bore stater types, all of these have got um bore in the hair uh on the obverse and um. Variations on the same basic theme of the human headed horse and uh the vertical lyre underneath them, um, the charioteer over the horse changes, um, he's, I'm not gonna say realistic, but perhaps slightly more realistic on Type A at the top, and then type B becomes very much more stylized.

Interestingly, Ribo um referred to the charity tier as having a robotic appearance, which is a very early use of of the word robot, um, and, um, that he used to to describe how that coin looked. Um, and then there's liar types which are, um, have either the lyre up above the hair in type A or in this type, um, on the cheek here.

And um These liar types in particular, they look a bit to to to sort of my eye, having looked at lots of ourorican coins for many years, they look a bit scrappy.

They're um um the the quality of the engraving is not, is not great, the the sort of the horse is a bit, um, not as nice, not as finely engraved as the correosolete coins, for example, and that has prompted people like me. Um, who should know better really, to make all sorts of assertions about when these coins were produced. Um, and this is what I said, uh, as long ago as 2019, which I would now say is almost totally wrong in almost every respect, um. And I did this really this stupid thing of people like me do it again and again of trying to link a few known historical figures with um things that we find, and I should really have known better than mentioning Vorridovis um because I don't think these coins have got anything to do with Vorridovis now, having looked at them a bit more closely. And one of the reasons why I think my chronology. It is wrong, um, that they're not very late, they're not, um, in any way associated with ridovis and the Gaelic war, is looking at what nu numismatists do, looking at in great detail at the dyes, at the, the chronology that we can get out of the um uh linking the different dyes that we used for the coinage.

And we've got to do just a very brief, um, Uh, sort of, uh, digression into, into the technology, the manufacture of these coins to explain this. They're all, um, and some of you will know this already, they're all hand struck, um, they're all, um, Made with um uh an obverse dye usually set, for example, set at the bottom there in a piece of wood or something like that, and then struck with, with the reverse dye, and by studying, The obverses and reverses and how they link up. You can start to form a chain of production, if you like, and this in turn gives you information about the chronology, about the length of time the coinage might have been produced over, about the intensity of production as well. So that I mean that die chain that I'm Showing there is nothing to do with our morican coinage. It's just an example of the left hand column of numbers, the obverse dies, the right hand column, the reverse dies and how there are there are links between them. And this is how you can develop a sort of a chain of production and start saying something about the length of time over which it was produced. And there are different ways of representing these die chains.

That's one way, this way, this is another one, this is one that I've been working on as just part of the choreosolete coinage, which is extraordinarily complex, um, far more than I think I or others um working on this had realised. This is just one group of coins among. The earliest choosy class class 6, and you can see there's multiple dyeings going on here.

Um, there's intensive production, um, one assumes that basically, I mean, I'm sort of this is um. An anachronistic, the way I'm describing this, but people are coming to the, the strikers, the moneyers are coming to work each day, uh, and, you know, just picking a couple of dies out of the box and using them for that day's strikes and then maybe they pick another couple of dies out the next day.

Um, it's it's intensive production over quite, um, possibly over quite a short period. And what has really struck me about now looking at the ribo intruders in more detail is that they are totally different, um, in terms of their dye linking to to really anything else I've looked at in in the Armorican coinage so far, certainly anything from around the period of high production around the Gallic War.

So instead of that sort of frenzy of links I just showed you for a choreosolete class here in in Bo Taipei, we've got just, we've got 9 coins and they're all from different diets.

There are no links at all. So you could argue that all they've got is 1 obverse and one reverse, and then when that runs out or when it gets too worn for further use, they get another obverse and reverse carry on like that. Um, it's totally different to that frenzied production, um, that we see in the choosy coinage, and the same is true for the other, um, in classes of, of ribos intruders.

There's a couple of links where an obverse is being used with two reverses on this one, but again, it's a, It's a very sort of slow, very um um uh very unintensive um production of coins and and it's true, as I said, throughout all of these, um, that's a curious one at the top left with the unusually with the head facing left, where the same obverse is used with five different reverses, perhaps they didn't like that one for some reason, um. I I should make it clear that these aren't all necessarily the product of the same mint as well.

These could be different mints producing these, but what they do have in common is this actually very sort of restricted use of the coinage it seems to be spread out. quite a long time.

And the last couple of examples, the buyer types, they're the same again. There's just no links between successive pairs of dyes. As I said, this is just something that I just haven't really seen in other armorican coinages I've looked at. It's very different. Um, if we want another little bit of information that we might be able to use from the coins to tell us something about the chronology, we can look at the weights, and this, I need to do more work on this, but this is in the red figures just gives you the average weight for these.

Coins and several of them you can see, particularly this 1 7.29 grammes, it's quite significantly heavier than the usual run of the choreosole coinage. And generally, the heavier the coins are, the earlier they are. It's not a perfect relationship. It's not a relationship that sort of that um changes consistently, but as a general sign, the the heavier the earlier they are. We're still Unsure where they actually come from.

Um, I think I, I questioned in the the sort of abstract for this talk whether they were made on Jersey. I don't think they were, um, but I'm not entirely sure where they did come up. There are so few fine spots to go on. Um, but we need, we probably need to look somewhere in that region east of us here, uh, somewhere across in the Cotonin, uh, as a source, um, perhaps those people who wrote.

Long before I ever wrote anything about this or perhaps or before Ribo wrote anything about this, um, we need to go back to people like Lomber who actually said, uh, in reason of the reson de la Matier, uh, premier emission de says especially uni.

Um, they're an early strike.

This is what the, the heavier weight and the um the lack of that intensive dye linking suggests they're actually quite early. They could be back in the early first century BC, something like that. They're nothing to do with the Gallic war at all. They're nothing to do with the ridovis or that final sort of explosion of of ourorican coinage of the mid first century BC. And We would perhaps we should perhaps extend a little bit wider the the sphere where they might have come from because of the links between the biocasses coinage that was that were also in Ribo's intruders and Aricatui at the bottom, but they remain.

Pretty much, um, as they were for for Major Ribo, pretty much enigmatic.

Thank you.