This morning I did a fun and fast visualization of the die clusters of RRC 25/1. You’ll have to wait until the final publication to see those.

I thought to myself is this similar or different than other striking patterns. I thought RRC 22/1 would be an ‘easy’ point of comparison. It wasn’t easy or fast, but it was interesting and v v different.

At first I was going to ignore the alphabetical sequence of the Greek control marks, but as I looked at the clusters they grouped so nicely around letter sequences that I felt I had to use it.

My first explanation is that there was one anvil working through the letters with the ‘reverse’ control marked die in the anvil (thus the obverse!) and that there was a die box next to the anvil with a number of punch dies ready to go.

Next steps.

• Check ‘odd’ reverses (the greens above).
• Check the overlaps to ensure the die ids are correct.
• Inspect flans for curvature.
• Consider if imitations ancient or modern may be effecting the results.
• Figure out what the Leake collection is (supposed to have a Pi specimen)
• Write Cambridge and ask if they really do have a Pi and if a photo could be sent
• Redraw with Greek letters for clarity.

I wonder if Theta was skipped for its association with death (thanatos). Perhaps H was skipped for fear of confusion with Zeta?

All die ids and links are based on the Schaefer Archive as catalogued in RRDP

The above diagram is interpretive.

If we do machine best fit. The three largest clusters show significant overlap in the linkages.

But there many single pairs and small changes as well. These I worked into the above chains in the diagrams above.

If there were not sequential control marks, I likely would have concluded this was at least partially a two anvil one die box system of striking. And that might also be true…

The AB die suggests to me they were engraving dies on an as needed basis at least at the end of the series.

Finally I’ll note that the ratio of obverses to reverses is 1:1.17. This is surprisingly like the ratios we see at the end of the republic. Even as there are die chains and clusters their still averaging the same type of usage.

The Romans struck a silver obol with RRC 13 in very small numbers (RRC 13/2), something that Burnett has shown fits well with the fashion for AR obols in Italy more generally. (earlier post). These coins are so small and so easy to lose it is possible more types, even Roman types might appear in future, just as we continue to learn of newer small denomination bronzes in the republican series.

Fractional silver doesn’t start up again until RRC 25 and 26 with drachma which continues into the Quadrigati series and then into the earlier denarii as well. Yes, I’m still worries about RRC 26, but this got me thinking about why specific denominations are struck and their utility. Clearly AR fractions are useful to the Romans or they would not endure as part of the production.

I’ve removed grossly overweight outliers from the CRRO data where it is clearly a cataloging error.

I find it interesting not only is RRC 26 still better regulated than other issues even here but its median and mean averages are closer to the quadrigati than RRC 25.

For all three issues the design of the drachm and didrachm is identical the only change is the size of the flan and die diameter.

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This is where RRC 25, 26, 27 look most similar. There is no meaningful difference in the struck bronze weight standard. The AE Litrae has the same design as the silver didrachm. Here there seems a tight fit of the three issues.

If we preserve the logic that the ROMA legend issues must come after all ROMANO issues, I lean right this moment to putting RRC 26 struck issues after RRC 27 and before the quadrigati issues.

I’m still not convinced the cast ae of RRC 26 is really the same issue as the silver or struck bronze. Why must we combine them?! I see no reason. If this is the case I’m happy to push the cast part of RRC 26 earlier.

And then that half litra with the dog… RRC 26/4. It feels free floating, untethered to the other coins in the issue with which it is grouped. And look! I have a note next to RRC 17/1 saying Molinari and Burnett 2015 have associated the Roma/Dog RRC 26/4 with RRC 17/1 based on the Ponte Gini scattered hoard.

If I get hit by a bus someone tell my beloved to scan and share my physical copy of RRC so everyone can have my pencil annotations.

RRC 27/3 is a weird double litra but at least that is marked by a club to anchor it into its series. RRC 27/4 is a red herring, separate from the rest of the series, being a semuncia of Luceria struck later.

I really am going to do the hoards one day. But NOT today.

Just as I’ve concluded there is no meaningful difference in the weight standards of RRC 14 and 18 (and 19), I’m comfortable now saying the same between RRC 21, 24, 25, 27 AND 35. RRC 35 was made on a much larger scale, far beyond any of the earlier aes grave issues. I might do the histograms it, but not today.

Haeberlin’s averages are

As = 267.83g from 1168 specimens

Semis = 269.07g from 312 specimens

Quadrans 270.37g from 266 specimens.

The problem is that RRC 26 looks like a different kettle of fish. A higher standard, a smaller issue, no real connection to the silver. I think it is a problem that does not need solving like RRC 19 the scale of the issue makes it of little real meaning for the overall pattern.

We’ve put a huge amount of importance on the change in legend from ROMANO to ROMA and thus it has been insisted that RRC 26 silver (ROMA) is felt must come after RRC 22 (ROMANO). And by extension the bronze that has been lumped in with RRC 26 silver. As we saw earlier the silver is a bit higher in typical weight and better regulated than others on the 6.6g standard.

Now we see the bronze is also out of sync. Also heavy, and made in smaller quantities and perhaps doesn’t even correspond with the silver at all. It doesn’t have a legend so we could push it between Group 1 (RRC 14, 18) and Group 2 (RRC 21, 22, 25, 27, and 35) and then call it transitional but we may just never know unless a few good hoards appear.

Messy.

Yet more and more I feel RRC 25 and 27 mark something new and interesting at the mint a real emergence of control and regulation. They are substantive and also perhaps more even. Their survival rates across denominations are less radically different that with some other issues. They are complete Uncia to As with no larger units.

What happened? Did the systems that were put in place for RRC 25 and 27 fall out of use because of scaling up of production? Perhaps.

You might have guessed that I’m doing a bit of pre writing here to augment another piece I’m working on. This type of blogging I find very useful as I try to decide what I think of the data.

Why did Crawford put this aes grave with the silver of RRC 26? The types are both revivals and they both have Apollo as the chief denomination but do they really go together?!

This data is so minimal it is hard to draw any conclusions. One new RRC 26 aes grave has appeared on the market and just adding in its weight changes the shape of the data, a nice reminder that this is not a very meaningful body of evidence from which to generalized.

I have not held this piece. I cannot authenticate it. The patina suggests it was recently unearthed likely in Italy. It is great shame we do not have the find data. Aes grave is not legal for export for just this reason.

But the data gets even MORE messy if we put in the specimen the Miles specimen in the ANS which is impossibly heavy. I’ve just about convinced myself that that acorn is really there behind Apollo’s head but I really don’t know what to think about this piece.

This minimal series looks like it might have been aiming at a higher weight standard, c. 290grams. The missing triens and uncia are strange indeed. A bit like RRC 19 which has only two cast denominations. I will only publish results based on Haeberlin numbers to keep my data set relatively consistent in it sourcing of evidence.

I’ve gotten faster now as I come to the end of the data extraction and processing. The As again shows the least variation and the highest average and median. The weight standard looks about the same as the Sickle standard but perhaps more tightly controlled across all denominations.

The acorn series feels out of place, again. Earlier blog post.

You can totally see why the semuncia stopped being made. What a radical difference in metal content. Again the As seems a higher weight standard and better controlled, but here the semis is more in line than with the wheel series. I see why Crawford decided to call this a 265 weight standard, but I don’t think it is out of the question it was thought of as on the same weight standards of these group 2 Aes Grave, slightly reduced from group 1 (RRC 14, 18, and 19).

I wonder if it was issued with RRC 22 even if there is no attempt to ensure they read as unified in the designs.

These certainly share a similar Roma design on the As and the didrachm.

The Roma of RRC 19 is markedly different

The RRC 24 Roma of the wheel series is certainly cut from the same cloth as RRC 21 and 22 helping me understand Crawford’s choice in relative sequencing to keep these issues close together.

I’m getting better at writing LLM prompts to extract data. I’ve not yet let it run my analyses as that feels like part of my own thinking at least until I’m confident at my methods and how I will check results. I want no magic black box to spit out answers. I do like less grunt work in transcription, data cleaning, etc… Copilot (university paid subscription) needs shorter sets of data but can handle multiple multiple pages of Haeberlin all at once and produce very usable PDFs with high accuracy (now that I’ve gotten better at prompt writing).

This is a weird picture. The As is much heavier than its fractions. I’m happy (ish) to ignore the tressis (1) and dupondius (14) but the As has 44 specimens and is clearly much more tightly controlled than the fractions as well as heavier.

Why does this series have no uncia?

My notes on Burnett 1989 say that he places this later in the relative chronology because of the standardized reverse on all denominations (cf. prow series) and CHRR 28. But I’m guessing the lack of the unciae is alway a good reason for bringing it down in the sequence of issues.

What should we use as the standard since it looks like the ass is significantly heavier than other denominations. The practical weight standard is 265 grams or so for the fractions, but 271 or so for the As.

I think the As is probably the best unit by which to judge the intended standard of production…

This work is building on my 2023 piece

“The Strangeness of Heavy Bronze” In S. Bernard, L. Mignone, & D. Padilla Peralta (Eds.), Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c.400-200 BCE (pp. 103-131). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023.

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I’m confident in Haeberlin’s weights based on my own reweighing in Berlin. See write up.

I’m corresponding with a very smart graduate student working on Bronze to Iron Age differences in the use of aes rude and thus have been talking about archaeological finds and how we date them.

She wrote me of Lucus Feroniae finds:

“… my dataset comes from the temple sectors excavated in 2000-2010. … In Serafin’s corpus there are no Roman denarii: the nine silver coins are all from southern Italy (Neapolis, Velia and Locri), while Roman bronze coins are often found together with aes rude.In Serafin’s corpus there are no Roman denarii: the nine silver coins are all from southern Italy (Neapolis, Velia and Locri), while Roman bronze coins are often found together with aes rude.”

“For Phase I, several primary foundation contexts contain Roman coins dated to 211-208 BCE. For example, US 79 has an uncia dated to 209-208 BCE (RRC 99,8 [= P series]), and US 93 has another uncia dated to 209-208 BCE together with aes rude. Serafin also records 89 coins from primary foundation deposits, with the latest issues reaching 208 BCE.”

This sent me to re read McCabe (and Russo) in RBN 2024:

RBN articles are restricted from online posting for two years so this one should be available shortly. If you need a copy now either McCabe or I can probably share one with you.

I agree with P being closer to Canusium that Luceria but likely a camp mint. McCabe does a great job mapping military action and regional coin finds.

The reason this P series coin at Lucus Feroniae in Phase 1 excites me is that the site was sacked in 211 BCE:

Here’s Livy 26.11 with the old translation wrongly using brass for bronze the Latin phrase is: aeris acerui = “a heap of bronze”

I’ve got to look at Serafin and consult McCabe! But that isn’t on the docket anytime soon, too many other tasks.

I was reading a draft of a collaborative piece and there was a casual reference to weight standards and I found myself wondering if Crawford was indeed correct.

Here’s my summary of the data.

First I think the weight standard is closer to 6.6 than the 6.75g Crawford reports.

RRC 26/1 looks tightly controlled and is slightly heavier in both mean and median that RRC 22/1, 25/1, or 27/1.

If we look at the various medians and means and interquartile ranges in the chart below I kind of want to nudge RRC 26/1 to before RRC 22/1. Is that nuts? Yes, it is. The legend Roma clearly is a breaking point and RRC 26 has more in common with RRC 25 and 27 but it certainly shouldn’t be separating RRC 25 and 27. I’ll have to look at the hoards again and the weights of the bronze not just the silver. I don’t want to do the bronze weights. I might not be able to resist.

RRC 25 and 27 look very similar indeed.

The quadrigati clearly have less concern for the weight standard control, not unexpected in such a large issue or rather issues.

The aes grave of RRC 26 survive in much smaller numbers and as we know now we’re missing the uncia, if one was ever made. By contrast for RRC 25 and 27 we have lots of unciae. So perhaps 26 comse after these two issues as an attempt to ensure higher standards at the mint.

The acorn symbol is curious. Sickle = Saturn = Treasury. Club = Hercules = Commercial Markets

An acorn? What is that a symbol of beyond some thing small and easily recognizable?

Lockyear’s database doesn’t have the early relevant hoards in it. Phooey. I don’t want to tabulate them myself either. We’ll see. Maybe after I read Burnett’s contribution to the RRDP volume I’ll find I don’t need to say any of this. He will have said sensible things and I can just cite that.

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Flashback

A year and a day ago I released a speculative reconstruction to that I cut from an early draft of this article:

“The end of the uncia at the Roman Mint” Revue Belge de Numismatique et de Sigillographie 170 (2024), p. 136-163. 

A senior colleague generously gave me a sneak peak of some weight data for known Oval series specimens pre publication. I wanted to think about it as a dataset so I drew some charts.

The series are whole, half, quadrans, sextans, uncia, semuncia if this is a base-12 series and I think it is based on this data. In the past I’ve wondered if it might be base-10, but I think that is likely wrong.

This box and whiskers graph helps us see the median in each group of data and inter quartile range for each denomination overlaps but not well. In the Roman RRC 14 and 18 series smaller denomination are overvalued compared to large one, but here it looks like the semis and the quadrans may be the heavy outliers. The graph is deceptive because we have far less of the whole, half, quadrans and semunica, and we have more than 4 times as many sextantes than unciae.

A Pareto histogram helps us see the long tail of outliers from the central grouping of the data. The picture doesn’t change if we divide the half units into a heavier and lighter series. The data has an incredibly high relative standard deviation of 22% but the other denominations do not easily separate into heavy and light series in any way. I explored the RSD of RRC 14 and 18 in a recent publication and the Roman series seem much better controlled than the club series with an RSD under 15% and under 10% for the as and semis. Smaller denominations do tend to have higher variation but by most metrics the Roman unciae (a contemporary coin of about the same mass) has an RSD under 20%. And I thought the Roman coinage was highly variable!

IF we focus just on the denominations for which we have robust data sets the picture doesn’t change. The RSD stays at 22%. But we do see the sharp drop off in specimens corresponding to a whole unit of more than 167 grams, we also see the long tails.

I decided to see what would happen if I removed the tails and played around with the number of bin:

Overall I’d say that the whole unit was probably about 155-160 grams but this has got to be a fiat currency with this degree of weight variation within denominations.

There was also some find spot data sent along so of course I did a map. Below are points where sextantes have been reported as found:

I’ve marked the primary area with yellow. Below is a standard map of “Etruria”

I wonder if this very simple design could have been made in more than one place in Etruria and perhaps served as a common currency throughout the League. It’s spread throughout the territory is remarkably even.

The Vulci and Ariccia hoards suggest a date similar to the RRC 14 and the currency bars (aes signatum), so 1st Punic War. Interesting how much lighter this weight standard is than the Roman one at the same time…

I’m very grateful for generous colleagues letting me play with there data.

Next Day Update.

A scholarly correspondent has sent me more citations and photographs AND another specimen from the Bern collection of a specimen of RRC 14/2 engraved along the edge and perhaps pierced?! This of course made me think of RRC 5/1 in Berlin that has an inscription:

AND looking for that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to make sense of Garrucci and Haeberlin’s conflicting testimony of a possible inscription in the Ariccia hoard, which led to some updates to a previous post. And revisting Ariccia hoard made me realize I really should publish a little note on the aes grave of Praeneste as it lets us date the series.

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Original post.

The Etruscan Necropolis of Poggio del Sole in Arezzo revealed in the late 19th century in controlled excavations an engrave Roman semis weighing 18.4 grams. The engraving is with an Etruscan name, likely a coin deposited with the deceased. Interestingly great care seems to have been taken not to obscure or deface the iconography of the coin.

The letters on the obverse begin beneath the head of Jupiter, curve around in front of it to a point above the head, and reveal the following name:

The letters on the reverse present greater difficulty; the first begins at the *acrostolion* (the curved prow ornament) of the ship, and they proceed from right to left:

This was read VE CRIVEPE AREVIZIES and pulled into Latin as Velius Crivepius Arevissii [filius]. Then the next year it was re read as Criuepeue Areuizies with the assertion that the first was the name of a lautni or freedman and the second was the name of the patron/master and of Celtic/Gallic origin. I find the proposed comparanda less than convincing in this second piece, but onomastics are not my specialty. I’m satisfied that it is all one name and that it is Etruscan and that the function was likely sepulcheral.

I’d dearly love to share a photo of this coin but know of none thus far. I wonder if it is in the Arezzo museum. I must visit next year. For the most part I agree with the interpretation:

The incising of an Etruscan personal name on a Roman *semis*, while entirely novel, is consistent with the customs of the time. In addition to marking the urn that held the deceased’s body and ashes, such inscriptions were sometimes found on objects that had belonged to the individual or had been deposited by grieving relatives in accordance with ritual practice. This served not only to clearly distinguish—within the same tomb—which items belonged to the deceased, but also to ensure that the objects (especially those of everyday use) would not be employed by the living. To this end, the word *SVTHINA* (“sepulchral”) was inscribed across the polished surface of mirrors from Volsinii; weapons and vessels were frequently broken; and the practice of depositing *aes rude* continued into the third century BC, even when coinage bearing official markings was already in use. I have even observed that, in the first century, *asses* of the uncial standard were snapped in two to prevent them from re-entering circulation. A truly rare example has also come down to us: a *sextantal as* bearing the inscription *FORTUNAI STIPE* (B. d’Ailly, *Recherches sur la monnaie rep.*, pl. LIV, p. 12), indicating that the coin was part of a *stips* (offering) dedicated to Fortuna—perhaps intended for the construction of a temple in her honor. Similarly, by examining the countermarks found on coins of the Roman Republic—most of which remain indecipherable—we may reasonably surmise that some represent marks associated with sacred offerings or with pooled funds collected for a specific purpose.

This and above machine translations of Gamurrini RIN 1891

I particularly like the idea that aes rude was preferred specifically for ritual purposes, cf. Praeneste practices. And I want to know more about this halving of asses in grave goods. The countermarks meant are likely bankers marks and those I’d connect to test cuts probably in conjunction with the legislation of Gratidianus and the Lex Cornelia. I’ve got a co-authored article that touches on that, but still awaiting proofs – so cannot share yet.

More on the Fortunai Stipe coin and parallels in an earlier post.

I wonder if some less that ethical individuals added the inscription to artifacts to raise their value through the application of a ‘unique’ ‘authentic’ feature… I wish I was not so suspicious.

No. I’ve not formatted that bibliography yet… Why do you ask…

Classic Researchastination. Or is it procrasti-posting?