“Iron Man” from Late Iron Age Central Europe. A La Tène C coin with a legend “Isarnos”

A unique Late Iron Age coin with a reverse legend ICAP И OC was stolen from the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Brodsko Posavlje in Slavonski Brod (Croatia) in 1991. The coin in question had an Arabeskenlocke OTA 424 subtype obverse, which is here classified as OTA 424 A. This type of coin is derived from earlier Audoleon-imitations produced in the northern and north-eastern periphery of the Pannonian Basin. The reverse of the stolen coin displays a horizontally flipped horse modelled upon Audoleon’s original Paeonian tetradrachms, which is a unique typological combination. The legend can be read as a personal name Isarnos, which has a transparent Celtic etymology : “Iron(-man)”, from *isarnon or *īsarnon (“iron”). The name and its derivatives are documented primarily in ancient and early mediaeval Gaul. It represents the name of a Late Iron Age member of local elite, who commissioned a coin bearing his name some-times during the La Tène C1 period (ca. 275-200 BC). The coin was produced somewhere in the region between the Carpathians, Transylvanian Plateau, Apuseni Mountains, and the Tisza and Mure ş rivers (roughly modern eastern Hungary and western Romania), but it remains unclear whether it was found in this territory (which is likely) or, perhaps, it arrived to the southern Pannonia during the Late Iron Age and was in this way acquired by the Slavonski Brod Museum.