Sauer, Eberhard

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritualCitation for published version:Sauer, E 2013, 'Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritual' Bulletin of the Association for RomanArchaeology, pp. 51-55.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Author final version (often known as postprint)Published In:Bulletin of the Association for Roman ArchaeologyPublisher Rights Statement:© Sauer, E. (2013). Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritual. Bulletin of the Association for RomanArchaeology, 51-55General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 20. Feb. 2015© Sauer, E. (2013). Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritual. Bulletin of the Association for Roman Archaeology, 51-55 Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritual1  By Eberhard Sauer  What have fish ponds at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, an ornamental water basin in front of the Zoroastrian Fire Temple at Yazd in Iran, a fountain at Barcelona Cathedral, a water pool in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, the Roman swimming pools at Bath and a dry well with a mirror at the bottom in the Limesmuseum in Aalen in Germany have in common? They have all received modern coin offerings, and the same is true for uncountable other watery features, ranging from the Trevi Fountain at Rome to a pool in Gatwick Airport. Coin deposition in water, believed to bring good fortune, has become a ritual practised on a global scale. Where did it originate? Nobody knows at which spring the first coin was offered. Of course, it must post-date the introduction of coinage. Coins recovered from the spring at Burgaski Bani in modern Bulgaria, with the telling name Aquae Calidae, i.e. ‘Hot Waters’, reach back to the 4th or even 5th century BC and early currency has also been found in springs in Italy. Of course, metal artefacts had already been ritually deposited in watery features before the first coins were minted. The earliest offering from the sacred spring at the Artemis sanctuary at Brauron, east of Athens, date to the 8th century BC. A wide range of Bronze Age and Iron Age metal artefacts have also been deposited in the bogs of southern Scandinavia and in the rivers of western Europe. This has led some to believe that coin offerings in springs in Roman Britain, Gaul and Germany are a ritual in native tradition. Yet, archaeology tells a different story. Unlike rivers and bogs, the number of springs in northern Europe with confirmed Iron Age offerings is minute, especially if one excludes late Iron Age objects, probably deposited in the early imperial era. Amongst the over 12,000 ancient coins recovered from the King’s Spring at Bath only one in every 700 is a pre-conquest issue. These few Late Iron Age pieces could still have circulated after the conquest and could have been deposited then. None of the ancient coins from thermal spring at Buxton or Coventina’s Well at Carrawburgh is pre-Roman. By contrast, we see a sudden almost explosive uptake of the ritual all over north-western Europe in the early imperial era. At Bourbonne-les-Bains over 3,000 were offered in the last decade of the 1st century BC, probably soon after Roman engineers had succeeded in building a catchment installation, so that the 66-degrees hot mineral water could be used to feed a bath-house. Coin offerings commence in the Augustan era at a number of other Continental springs too, notably the spa at Wiesbaden.  Normally small denominations were chosen for offering, especially in Italy and the earliest deposits in the north. Under Augustus many halved asses, representing half the nominal value of this denomination, were a particular favourite. Nonetheless, one must not underestimate the value of such a piece. An as may be as small a two-pence coin, yet it represented a tenth of the daily earnings of a legionary, and thus was vastly more valuable than small change today; a halved as was still worth some 5%. Coin offerings in antiquity were deliberate meaningful religious rituals, not the                                                           1 I am very grateful to Mr Henri Troisgros for his kind permission to study the coins from Bourbonne-les-Bains. He, Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, Professor Martin Henig and Dr Cathy King all offered invaluable advice and support for my doctorate, which parts of this article are based upon. 2  casual act we witness today. What motivated this practice in antiquity? A silver or gold coin was deposited in the spring at the Amphiareion healing sanctuary in Greece on the occasion of a successful cure from a disease (Pausanias 1.34.4), and similar motives may be behind many coin offerings at springs believed to have curative powers. Not all offering need be related to the healing cult. Circumstantial evidence suggests that at some sites coins with the image of Augustus may have been deposited for his well-being, similar to a custom attested for Lacus Curtius votive shaft on the Forum Romanum at Rome. Unsurprisingly, the earliest spas in the northern provinces seem to have been built for the army. Legionaries, initially mainly of Italian origins, were accustomed to hot baths, particular welcome in the cold northern provinces. In addition to much-needed relaxation, hot mineral waters, such as those at Bourbonne, helped to heal fractures, wounds and rheumatism. The very same southerners also brought with them the practice of coin deposition in springs, well established in Italy at the time. The hot spring of Vicarello near Rome has yielded over 5,000 Republican coins, the Fountain of Anna Perenna at Rome over 500 imperial pieces. Pliny the Younger (Letters 8,8,2) famously describes coin offerings in the clear waters of the Clitumnus Spring: ‘Underneath this [cypress-covered hill] emerges a spring, gushing out in several veins of unequal strength; it first forms a whirl-pool and then flows into a wide basin, so pure and crystal-clear that you can count the coin offerings and the shining pebbles.’ Italy was the springboard from where the practice of depositing coins in springs started to conquer the world. Yet, it did so with considerable regional variations. In Roman Gaul and Germany it flourished in the east and far less so in the west. In Britain, it remained confined to a far smaller number of sites than on the Continent. To some extent this may be related to recent tectonic activity having created more hot springs in eastern Gaul and Germany than in Britain. Yet, coin offerings are not confined to thermal waters. Indeed, one of the two largest recorded coin deposits in a spring in the Roman Empire known to me was recovered from a, now dried-up, cold spring, Coventina’s Well. The largest votive coin deposit from a spring in Roman Germany, at Bornheim-Roisdorf, was also extracted from a cold spring. It was the Roman army that appears to have introduced the practice to the Empire’s north-western border zones, but it soon attracted local imitators, though with considerable regional variations. At Bath and Buxton the practice remained vibrant until the 4th century, whilst a Coventina’s Well it continued on a reduced scale, but lost popularity. An earlier hypothesis that parts of the coins from Coventina’s Well are part of a hoard is unlikely to be correct, as the number of offerings decreased gradually over time, rather than suddenly. Like with many other imported Roman customs, such as setting up tombstones for the deceased, it was left to locals (of sufficient means in the case of tombstones) whether they did or did not wish to adopt it. Around AD 400 Rome ceased to produce large quantities of base metal coins for the northern provinces. As a result, coin finds and deposits, at religious and secular sites alike, plummeted. A few springs have yielded coins of the second half of the first millennium, but in the west there is no spring with more than an average of one coin per century. The writings of the church fathers, strongly opposed to nature veneration, suggest that spring veneration now mainly adopted archaeologically untraceable forms, such praying, making vows, lighting candles or offerings organic substances, such as bread. Unquestionably, medieval spring veneration had changed substantially, 3  but a more materialistic approach survived. Whilst in the Iron Age springs had emerged largely as nature had created them, in the Roman period many, notably most thermal springs, were encased in architecture, to feed bath-houses as well as to form the foci for religious ceremonies. In the Christian Middle Ages the church, having realised that spring veneration could not be eradicated, sometimes incorporated holy wells and springs into Christian ecclesiastical architecture, such as a chapel at Marcilly-en-Bassigny over a spring in the middle of the forest in France. The veneration of springs and other natural features indeed proved one of the most enduring forms of cult. Not only did the church fight a losing battle against springs continuing to attract religious devotion in Christian Europe, spring veneration also proved remarkably resilient in the wake of other profound changes. When around AD 260 the Germanic Alamanni took over the land between the Rhine, the Danube and the ‘Limes’, that had previously been under Roman rule, all Roman religious cult seems to have ceased. There is no evidence for continued ritual, as far as I am aware, in any of the numerous excavated temples in the area. Yet, spring veneration survived. Several springs have yielded late Roman coinage. Most notably at Rottenburg-Bad Niedernau a spring, whose waters contain carbon dioxide and are still in demand as table water today, received coin offerings until AD 364/378 or even AD 375/392, more than a century beyond the end of Roman rule. Perhaps the Roman relic population continued to be drawn to this numinous place and only ceased to make such offerings when coins disappeared from circulation and were no longer available. Spring veneration has a remarkable capacity to survive the most profound cultural and religious changes. Rottenburg-Bad Niedernau is an interesting example of this phenomenon and very much reminds me of a site I had visited on a journey to Pakistan after my A-levels. In the suburbs of Karachi one finds the Mangho-Peer shrine, dedicated to an Islamic saint associated with a feature which is probably of earlier origins: a pool with thermal spring water forms the habitat for marsh crocodiles, fed with meat by pilgrims. Neither German invaders nor Christianity nor Islam entirely succeeded in eradicating nature cults.  Whilst the types of offerings changed again and again as well as, to some extent, the springs and wells attracting worship, there appears to be an element of continuity in spring veneration reaching back some 2,000 years. The roots of spring veneration are lost in the mists of time. Notably those with hot waters forming clouds of steam formed impressive natural sights in prehistory, before their waters were systematically used in bah-houses in the Roman era. Yet prehistoric spring veneration seems to have adopted a largely immaterial and archaeologically untraceable form. Occasionally the strong local dominance of a deity with a native name presiding over a spring, such as Sulis at Bath, provides a concrete hint of likely pre-Roman roots. Yet, the mass deposition of objects in springs occurs first in the Roman era in northern Europe and is still or again practised today: perhaps one of Rome’s most pervasive legacies. Figures: Fig. 1: At the Metropolitan Museum at New York tourists deposit coins in every water feature in sight – or have to be discouraged from doing so. Fig. 2: Modern coin offerings at Cheddar Gorge. 4  Fig. 3: The Trevi Fountain in Rome: arguably the most famous water feature attracting coin offerings today. Fig. 4: Map of selected springs with ancient votive coin deposits. Fig. 5: The source of the river Douix at Châtillon-sur-Seine has not just yielded late Iron Age and early Roman coin offerings, probably all deposited under Roman rule in the later 1st century BC and early 1st century AD, but also brooches of the 8th/6th century BC. It is almost unique as a spring in having received certain pre-Roman religious votive offerings. Fig. 6: Quadrantes, the smallest denomination in the currency system at the time, were the favourite coins chosen for deposition in the hot spring at Bourbonne-les-Bains. No less than 1,500 of this type, with an eagle on the reverse, are still in the collections today. Fig. 7: Halved coins were popular too. Here a halved as from Bourbonne, minted at Nemausus (Nîmes), with a crocodile chained to a palm tree on the reverse. Fig. 8: An Augustan quadrans (bottom right) and as (top left), both from the votive deposit in Bourbonne-les-Bains’ hot spring, may be of a similar size to the smallest coins in our currency today, but were much more valuable: a legionary under Augustus received the equivalent of 10 asses or 40 quadrantes per day. Fig. 9: Coin of Lucilla from Bourbonne, minted at Rome (AD 163-180). The coin with Concord on the reverse has been ‘ritually killed’ by approximately ten cuts. Fig. 10: The Clitumnus Fons in Umbria with its amazingly clear water was already admired by Pliny the Younger who saw here votive coins under the water. Fig. 11: Late coins from the votive deposit in Bourbonne’s thermal spring (from left to right): a base metal coin of Magnentius with large chi-rho symbol (AD 350-353), a gold solidus of Honorius (AD 394-402) and a silver obol of Pepin II of Aquitaine (AD 839/845-852). Fig. 12: The water from the Römerquelle (‘Spring of the Romans’) at Rottenburg-Bad Niedernau is still in demand today. Fig. 13: This Apollo relief was found at the Römerquelle, as well as some 300 coins, from Nero to Valens or Valentinian II. Fig. 14: Built over a miraculous spring in the forest: the chapel of Notre-Dame de Presles near Marcilly-en-Bassigny. Fig. 15: Thermal springs formed impressive natural sanctuaries in prehistory, with clouds of steam forming over hot pools of water. As a result of most thermal springs being encased in architecture since Roman times, this is a rare sight in Europe today, but can still be appreciated at some hot springs. Manikaran in the Himalayas is sacred to Hindus and Sikhs alike. Further Reading: Sauer, E., 2005. Coins, cult and cultural identity: Augustan coins, hot springs and the early Roman baths at Bourbonne-les-Bains. Leicester: Leicester Archaeology Monographs 10. 5  Sauer, E., 2011. ‘Religious Rituals at Springs in the Late Antique and Early Medieval World’, in Lavan, L. and Mulryan, M. (eds), The Archaeology of Late Antique Paganism, Leiden: Late Antique Archaeology 7 (Brill): 505-550. Sauer, E., 2005. ‘Secrets of a Sacred Spring: Bourbonne-les-Bains.’ Current World Archaeology 13: 20-27. 

Sacred springs and a pervasive Roman ritual

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