Many of the finds of this period are most interesting, as showing the taste of the people in the North, and a wealth and civilisation of which we were not aware. They are the more valuable because we see from them the wide extent of the maritime expeditions and overland trading journeys of the people towards the beginning of the Christian era. They show, as has already been pointed out, the intercourse which the people of the North had with those of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and also with the newly-acquired north-western provinces of the Roman empire (Gaul, Britain, and Frisia). But, what is still more important, they help to prove the general truthfulness of the earlier Edda and Sagas, for they show that the Asar, or whoever the emigrants were, who came north, and who were said to have brought their civilisation with them and to have given it to the people there, were either related to or on intimate relations with the people who inhabited the shores of the Black Sea; for many of the antiquities which were claimed to be of a peculiar northern origin are identical with those found there; while similar ornaments of unmistakable Greek origin are found in both regions. To complete the chain of proof, many of the antiquities, both in the Museums of Kief and Smolensk, are similar to those of the North. Many of the forms of the antiquities, such as neck-rings and gold snake-shaped bracelets, fibulæ, &c., which were thought to belong exclusively to the North, are found in great number in the graves of Kertch, in Southern Russia, where they lie almost side by side with the exquisite Grecian antiquities—the pride of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg—mementoes of the colonies established by Greece on the shores of the Black Sea. They show that at that period there were two distinct civilisations and peoples living near each other—one Greek, the other native. The natives were probably of the same stock as a great number of the people of the North. Western and Eastern, Roman and Byzantine, coins have been found; the gold solidi were for the most part used by the people in the North as ornaments, for loops have been attached to or holes made through them. The two largest discoveries hitherto made of Roman coins are those of Hagestaborg, in Scania, southern Sweden (550 denarii), found in 1871, and of Sindarfe (Hemse parish), Gotland, at which latter spot about 1,500 Roman coins were found, in 1870, in a clay urn.[169] Few coins dating before the Christian era have been found. The people had to learn that these coins had an intrinsic value, and that with them they could buy goods. In every country where barter takes place it has taken a certain, sometimes a great, number of years for the people to learn this value.[170] The fact that the earlier coins are rare does not conclusively prove that intercourse between the North and the Western parts of Europe had not taken place before that time.