Roman Gold Bars
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Roman gold bars, circa 375 CE.
Image provided courtesy of the Bank of England Museum
Few Roman gold bars survive. The ones shown here were probably meant to be melted down for coinage. The bars in the picture are part of a hoard of 15 that were buried, no doubt for safe-keeping, in Czófalva (modern-day Hungary), probably in the late fourth century. Their owner never returned to them and so the hoard lay undiscovered until it was found in 1887. They have the stamps of the mint at Sirmium (modern-day Sremska Mitrovica, 55 km west of Belgrade), one of the most important cities of the Roman Empire.
