Lingones 'Potin aux trois poissons'

[Pellinore]

This fine little billon coin reached out to me, and now I can cradle it between my fingers.
It's a coin of the Lingones, a tribe living on the Langres plain, now department Haut-Marne.

I was much taken by the motifs on both sides. In French the coin was named 'Potin aux trois poissons', 'Billon with Three Fishes', but these living triskelis doesn't contain fishes in my opinion. One side shows three organic forms like fish bladders, reaching up to the architectonic motif from Gothic times, the 'Fischblase' or 'Schneuss' in German, see this Wikipedia article. I don't know the English term. There are also three little organisms consisting of a tailed head.

The other side shows three leeches, can't think of describing these differently. Did the leech have some symbolic meaning, that a tribe was putting these on a coin? Leeches were used for medical purposes since thousands of years. 

LaTour 8329. Castelin 604, BMC Celts III 453-458 (I only saw the first ref. for myself).
18 mm, 2.23 gr.

-- Paul

[Guillaume Hermann]

Hi,

I never heard about the term "Lingones" for what we call "Lingons". According to Ggle, it seems "Lingones" is a 19th century or a Belgian term; but if you are searching about them in France you would have better to use "Lingons".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingons

"Potin" is absolutely not "billon". Billon is a poor alloy of silver and billon coins are struck; potin is an alloy of tin, cooper and sometimes lead, and potin coins are cast. Your coin is a potin.

[Figleaf]

I find Celtic art a difficult subject, since there seem to be many of them. Indeed, the British isles variant seems to prefer crosses, triskeles and spirals, but the shapes on your coin are more popular in what is now France. I have attached a picture from Wikipedia that is a fine example of French Celtic art and described as ... vegetal!

Celts were of course quite capable of abstract thinking. They might not have bothered to think of fashionable shapes in terms of "what's it supposed to be", but rather in terms of composition "that looks good there", all the more so because Celtic art often has an abstract quality to it. I would look at the decoration as a functional whole. At least one side would be a clan or power symbol (they might be two interpretations of the same symbol.) Therefore it may be connected to warfare.

Since Celts typically used round shields, it could e.g. be a shield decoration. Wikipedia mentions that there was a Celtic, later Roman fortress in Langres. The surface of what is now the "Citadelle de Langres" is roundish. It is tempting, but probably hard to prove to see the symbol as an abstract rendition of the fortress from the air, a round tower, three redoubts to protect it and a pallisade around the foot of the promontory.

Peter

Illustration by BastienM - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19096195

[Pellinore]

Hi,

I never heard about the term "Lingones" for what we call "Lingons". According to Ggle, it seems "Lingones" is a 19th century or a Belgian term; but if you are searching about them in France you would have better to use "Lingons".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingons

"Potin" is absolutely not "billon". Billon is a poor alloy of silver and billon coins are struck; potin is an alloy of tin, cooper and sometimes lead, and potin coins are cast. Your coin is a potin.

O.K., a potin. I'm sure modern French use is 'Lingons' but the old Latin name is Lingones (like the English one), probably. I don't know how they called themselves.
-- Paul

[Guillaume Hermann]

The kinds of S (on the other side than "fishes") has been interpreted as seahorses, but I really think everyone is free to interprete it as he wants!
Peter, quite surprising when I re-opened this topic, because some months ago I saw "in real" the Celtic artefact of which you published a photo! It is in the musée de Louvres, no relation with the musée du Louvre! In the city of Louvres, in the North of Paris, there is a little museum about archeology in Ile-de-France and you can see, in fact, a good modern copy of this object.

[Pellinore]

Here is an excellent short essay about the Lingones, by the way also showing that their name is not a 19th century invention, but a name known since Roman times.

-- Paul

[Figleaf]

I think Paris just wanted to point out that Googling for "Lingones" will get you no hits in French. True, but Googling "Lingons" (dangerously close to Klingons") will get you few if any hits in English.

This is a particular example of a generic problem that plagues international co-operation among historians, archeologists and numismatists: European languages sometimes attach different geographical and personal names to the same people. In fact, French is particularly "deviant" in this area. Jules César is still understandable for your average Dutchman, but if the Dutch go local also, all bets are off. What is the link between Jacqueline de Bavière and Vrouw Jacob? More important, how do you set up a data base of e.g. archeological finds that can be used in multiple languages?

In many cases, road signs have been adapted to cultural differences, so that a Belgian, following signs for Rijssel is not suddenly lost when he crosses the French border, unless he knows the name in French is Lille and a Frenchman wanting to go to Aix-la-Chapelle no longer has to buy another map to realise he should continue by looking for signs for Aachen when he reaches Germany. This is major progress realised during my lifetime, so maybe there is hope for international numismatics.

Peter