The Auriol Hoard, at the Origins of Provençal Numismatics

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The main chapter presented the discovery and composition of the Auriol hoard. This zoom follows what became of it: how a broken clay vessel, found by chance in a field, became the founding piece of Provençal numismatics — and why its 2,130 coins are today scattered across several continents.

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📢 A discovery made public

After the discovery of the hoard by the farmer Aubert in February 1867, it was Abbé Bargès who publicized the find through the local press, quickly drawing the attention of authorities and scholars to what might otherwise have remained a forgotten curiosity from a field. The gray clay vessel that had contained the coins, now fragmentary, is preserved at the Musée d’Archéologie nationale in Saint-Germain-en-Laye — the same museum already cited in earlier chapters for its Bronze and Iron Age collections.

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🌍 A dispersal across Europe

The hoard did not stay together for long. The collector Charvet acquired more than half of it on behalf of the senator and archaeologist Félicien de Saulcy, while the rest of the coins were dispersed through sales and scholarly exchanges among the British Museum, several regional French collections, and private holdings, notably those of the numismatists Blancard and de Clapiers. This dispersal, unremarkable for its time, now complicates any comprehensive study of the hoard, which must be reconstructed from scattered catalogues and publications rather than a single intact collection.

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🏛️ The starting point of Provençal numismatics

On the reverse, the coins bear a characteristic incuse pattern, known as “swastika-like” or “pinwheel,” typical of archaic Ionian coinage — a technical detail that allows numismatists to place them precisely within the monetary production of the eastern Greek world of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE. By its scale and antiquity, the Auriol hoard constitutes the earliest known coinage on French soil, and the conventional starting point of Provençal numismatics: every subsequent study of archaic monetary circulation in southern Gaul still refers back to it today.

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🧠 Key points

• Abbé Bargès made the discovery of the Auriol hoard public through the local press, shortly after it was unearthed in 1867.
• The clay vessel that held it is now preserved, in fragments, at the Musée d’Archéologie nationale in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
• The 2,130 coins were quickly scattered among the British Museum, French regional collections, and private collectors (Charvet for Félicien de Saulcy, Blancard, de Clapiers).
• Their reverse pattern, characteristic of archaic Ionian coinage, makes the Auriol hoard the earliest known coinage in France and the starting point of Provençal numismatics.