gress. This foreign money, which is here and there ehumed, is very important, and deserves particular attention, inasmuch as it not only serves to explain the commercial relations of antiquity, but often determines the age of other objects deposited with it; since the inscriptions which it bears can be referred to a positive period, which is seldom, if ever, the case with our other northern antiquities.
The oldest coins met with in Denmark are of Roman origin, and almost without exception date from 50 to 200 years after the birth of Christ. Of about the same period are 420 Roman coins, (from Tiberius to Marcus Aurelius,) which were dug up from a peat bog near Slagelse, towards the close of the last century. In other places also, for instance in Holstein, silver and copper coins of the same date have been found, but they occur most numerously in Bornholm. Roman imperial coins, which almost exclusively belong to those dates, are also met with in Sweden, but chiefly in Gothland and Oeland, as well as in the countries east and west of the Baltic, in Posen and in Poland, which seems to indicate that the connection which at that time existed between the Roman empire and the North originated and was kept up by means of the Roman possessions in Hungary. The fact that the coins belong to the period from 50 to 200 years after the birth of Christ may reasonably be explained by the circumstance that the Romans possessed fortified possessions in Hungary till about the close of the second century of the Christian era, for as early as the third century the Goths began to make incursions into the Roman empire, which from that time continued to lose more and more of its possessions, while it was torn both by external and internal wars. Amongst coins of the third and fourth century we find few if any Roman coins; nor was it till the division of the Roman empire into two portions, those of Eastern and Western Rome, which occurred about the year 400, that a connection with the eastern empire, whose capital was Byzantium, (Constantinople,) appears to have been opened.
