A Truly Remarkable Find

Very interesting, thank you for sharing!

Fifty years ago (or so) I had the great pleasure of viewing some exquisite Roman coins owned by a 'distinguished' member of a Boston area collecting club
As a young lad working in a law office he had acquired them as part of an estate of a high ranking American General who served in the allied occupation of Germany
While not knowing the source of this 'hoard' he later deduced it quite likely came from a looted museum inventory
Several years later I had the pleasure of visiting the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin .
The war damage was quite visible as we approached
The repairs having a slightly different color stone
While most of the great pieces (ironically 'looted' by Henry Schliemann) remained
Notably the great "Altar of Pergamon" (much was lost)
I am not surprised by this find
I suspect much more remains 'ratholed' in the vicinity

Cool article.
Just goes to show that if you keep looking down, you just might find something.
Joanne

To be more precise regarding the coin: it is a bronze coin (the names of Greek coin denominations are not known with certainty, so we usually just classify them by size) from the city of Ilion (that's spelled ILION in case the capital-I-lowercase-L is confusing). "Ilion" was the name given by the Greeks to the city built upon the ruins of Troy and is the origin of the name of Homer's epic, the Iliad. The abbreviated name of the citiy, "ILI" in Greek letters, appears on the reverse of the coin.

Calling it a "Trojan" coin is somewhat anachronistic, as the "Trojans" of Homer's myth were all long dead and gone by the time coinage was invented. Though the people of Ilion knew full well their city was built on the ruins of Troy and even turned parts of the old ruins into a tourist attraction, the people of Ilion would not have called themselves "Trojans". The Trojans did, after all, lose the Trojan war, and coins weren't invented until some 600 years after the fall of Troy. As an aside, one of my favourite coin-related movie mistakes is in the 2004 Troy movie, where at a funeral two coins are placed on the eyes of the deceased to "pay the ferryman". I give the movie-makers plus-5 points for knowing about that obscure ancient Greek numismatic funeral practice, but minus-100 points for not knowing that at the time the Trojan war allegedly took place, coins hadn't been invented yet.

By 300 BC, Ilion was still a relatively small and poor village just beginning to re-find its feet again, largely on the back of the tourist trade. Homer's story was popular, and everyone (including Alexander the Great) wanted to go see the ruins of Troy for themselves. These coins are not the earliest known coins issued by Ilion, but they were the first time mintages were large enough for the coins to not be considered ultra-rare.

As for the question "how did this coin end up in Berlin", I do agree that "some coin collector or museum lost it" is a more probable explanation than "it was brought there by Germanic tribesmen in ancient times". The ancient Germans knew little and cared less about bronze coins; it was silver and gold that they wanted and hoarded. In the Greek monetary system, bronze coins were a purely local currency, useless in long-distance trade. Nobody back then would have transported a coin that was worthless outside of Ilion's city limits thousands of kilometres away to the German wilderness.

Thanks, Sap, for the additional information.