I’m sick, nothing special, just old-fashioned winter cold. I keep overdoing it before I’m fully well and then backsliding. Not a good pattern. I’m trying to slowly tend to communications and other tasks and nurse this pot of tea.
Anyway, I was looking at Crawford’s catalogue of the Nemi material to give the Nottingham curator how long I might wish for that visit later this year.
I was struck by the large numbers of RRC 38/7 and the pretty remarkable number of RRC 38/3 as well.
The former Mercury-Prow struck piece seems to average in the 6-4 grams range, and this small Roma-Prow seems to fall in the 3-1.5 grams range. (I’m eyeballing not actually running the numbers here!)
What really gets me is that this is the only so called quartuncia in the whole series. There are more of this type of semuncia to follow that look very similar and also are without a denomination mark but previous semuncia absolutely had a denomination mark and very late semuncia also had denomination marks (all semuncia types in CRRO).
How would anyone have known that these two coins were these denominations? Clearly they were accepted and readily used and small, light coins are certainly convenient, but after distribution as pay (if that is how they entered circulation), how did they come to be accepted and spendable at a specific monetary rate. How different at all are these from earlier struck bronze (issued at the same time as cast!), which Crawford called litra or double litra, such as RRC 13/2, RRC 16, and RRC 17 and more (all these types of issues in CRRO). These three show up in the Nemi lists. Why aren’t we calling 38/3 a litra and 38/7 a double litra?!
Grueber BMCRR p.26n.1 says D’Ailly (p. 115) is the first to recognize this denomination and connected it to the semi-libral standard.
Today, as I’m able:
Book manuscript PR review
article PR review
send emails RE Nottingham
Schaefer
RE April event
that’s more than enough…
Liv Mariah Yarrow 