A Related Collectible

 

 

This is probably from the English region of Kent.  The man who found it was from Birmingham, but his heirs said that he worked almost exclusively in eastern Kent.

The people, (Britons) before the Roman conquest are often referred to as Celts, and when they were eventually driven west and north by the much later Anglo Saxons and Vikings, they continued to be called Celts.  They ended up along the Atlantic coast of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and in much of Ireland.  This is only a grand fiction however.  There is not a drop of Celtic blood in the Celts of Great Britain.  The Celts(in the beginning called Celtoi by the Greeks) were a people of central Europe...Germany, Austria, Switzerland and into central-eastern France.  The rest of the so called Celtic tribes were more trading partners, and peoples who, in order to trade with the Celts and the Celtic speaking Greeks and Etruscans, learned Celtic, and adopted many facets of the Celtic culture.  Art literature, language itself, customs and religion were readily adopted as they were all to great advantage in a huge trading sphere that covered much of Europe and into the middle east and Russia.

The Cantiaci or Cantii lived in Kent, called Cantium by Caesar..  Their capital was Durovernum Cantiacorum, which is present day Canterbury.

This piece is silver, engraved and heavily patinated, and found near a village that was dated to the 2nd Century BC.  It is not a coin, but was probably a religious object or amulet.  Unfortunately this becomes a "catch all" term for anything that they do not know the reason for,.  The front is a nice patinated gray, while the back is a nice soft silver, probably from sitting in a cloth display and being regularly slid around on the cloth surface.

This is deeply engraved on a silver blank, and it took many man hours to make the disk and then to engrave the piece.