Roma e Hispania

Rome and Hispania

Rome and Hispania

Rome

It was during the Republic that bronze coins started to be made, first large ones, but then smaller and smaller ones, and with different weights and values. These were known as aces. The Roman Republic also issued some silver coins, similar to the Greek ones. The silver coin most characteristic of Rome was the dinar.

The Imperial Roman coin consolidated the custom of a portrait of the person in power or symbolising the State. With variations and exceptions, this has continued through to modern times. The reverse sides commemorate historical events and, in the form of allegories, the view that these personalities had, or wanted to give, of themselves.

In the centre of this Room 3 we can see a model of the city of Rome, with its best known buildings and how some of these were also immortalised on their coins.

Hispania

Phoenicians and Greeks arrived on the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula during the first millennium B.C., establishing permanent colonies on our coasts. These towns were where the first coins were produced on Spanish soil, alongside the so-called Hispano-Carthaginian mints.

During the 3rd century B.C. In the Iberian Peninsula, some indigenous communities, Iberians and Celtiberians, started to strike coins in bronze and silver with mottoes written in their own alphabets. As the process of Romanisation spread across the Peninsula, towns and cities adopted Roman laws and customs and started including the Latin alphabet on their coins.