adventures in my head
I’m so proud of Lucia Carbone and all the other contributors to this massive catalogue of Rick’s donations to the ANS — 3,726 coins!
My text in this volume is v minimal, but includes what I hope is a useful summary of a few of the major re datings and re attributions since Crawford.
Buy your own copy! [ANS members–remember to ask for your 30% discount]
I was honored to visit Prof. Sailakshmi Ramgopal’s Roman history class at Columbia to give an introduction to Coins. I was asked to share my materials and when I do so I like to keep an archive here for future reference.
Slide Deck (PDF)
This particular class centers Commodus as that is where the students were in the semester. I give variations of this class with numerous other tailored set pieces and depending on the audience more on the origins of coinage and more on the global phenomenon of money.
Archiving some thoughts I threw up on FB earlier this week for future reference. All images borrowed from a BCC news story.
Things I love about this new Pompeii fresco showing Paris inviting Helen to Troy:
1) The dog knows this is a terrible idea. Dogs are often symbols of fidelity and this one know marital trust and guest-friendship are both about to be broken. He breaks the fourth wall and gives us the viewer a knowing glance. [On dogs as such symbols]
2) The lady-in-waiting (slave?) knows too. This reminds me that hardworking girl on the skyphos who gives side eye to the Athenian wife getting drunk in her own store room.
3) Helen’s profile, hair, jewelry looks an awful lot like the so called painted portraits of Cleopatra (VII).
4) Paris’ eastern costume looks less silly than in most cases. The color block squares and the overall get up even how he holds his shepherd’s crook all have a more exotic dignified look… [compare say the costume of Ascanius from Pompeii IX.13.5]
I’m curious about the identification of the woman on the Omphalos as Cassandra. Cassandra has a clear iconography for her rape by Ajax, but seated on an Omphalos? I don’t have a parallel. I associate the Omphalos with Delphi so my first thought was the Pythia. I did waste a little time with the LIMC before posting this. I learned that Cassandra poor thing doesn’t get her own entry but rather appears with all the men who fucked up her life. Seems an injustice…
On FB some agreed with me, others pointed out that Cassandra fits better with theme of room as a whole (as we understand it at present) and suggest the omphalos could just represent her gift of prophecy.
As I think about orientation of designs both relative and absolute, I’m now thinking of the open hand on RRC 14/4. It is always photographed with fingers pointing up but they could easily be shown pointed to the left and thus a right hand extended in a gesture of offering partnership like the Augustan coinage (RRC 546).
We might lean away from this option because of the open left hand on some of the other aes grave (RRC 21/4 and RRC 27/8), but I find it useful to consider about the assumptions we bring to the designs.
The ‘knuckbone’ is also called an Astragalus (or Talus in Humans).
I need to be able to describe the parts of the bone in order to describe the orientation of design and spues and other features of the individual coin specimens.
From Barr, W.. (2014). Functional Morphology of the Bovid Astragalus in Relation to Habitat: Controlling Phylogenetic Signal in Ecomorphology. Journal of Morphology. 275. 10.1002/jmor.20279.
From Gustafson, Eric. (2015). An early Pliocene North American deer: Bretzia pseudalces, its osteology, biology, and place in cervid history. University of Oregon Museum of Natural History Bulletin. 25.
From: Solounias, Nikos & Danowitz, Melinda. (2016). Astragalar Morphology of Selected Giraffidae. PloS one. 11. e0151310. 10.1371/journal.pone.0151310.
From DAvIS, SJM & GOnçAlvES, MJOS & Gabriel, Sónia. (2008). Animal remains from a Moslem period (12th/13th century AD) lixeira (garbage dump) in Silves, Algarve, Portugal. Revista Portuguesa de Arqueologia. 11. 183-258.
So where does this leave me in my vocabulary. I think we can say on RRC 14/6 the knucklebone is shown on the plantar side, which we might also call the ventral or posterior view. I will consider the distinctive interarticular groove and related proximal triangular fossa to be indicative of the ‘top’ and use it as my primary reference point.
Interestingly this is by chance the second lowest scoring/most common throw in a game of chance.
Update 23 Apr 2024:
Post started earlier this week but never published
I’m waiting for my next Haeberlin tray and thinking about where he sourced his coins and equally where the Nemi coins not in Nottingham… Haeberlin bought a number, but most went to Pasinati and we have no weights. Who was Pasinati? I must say I’m surprised at my lack of luck thus far satisfying my curiosity about his identity and how his portion of the Nemi material was likely dispersed.
I’m looking for traces of what he was known to have…
Garrucci included a piece from his collection in his supplement:
“From the collection of Pasinati, now in that of Mr. Pietro Stettiner. Fragment of a quadrilateral bar with a dolphin of archaic style on both sides, the first quadrilateral known to be found in Rome, it was raised from the waters of the Tiber precisely between Ponte Kotto and Ripa Grande, Pesa gr. 1460 equal to four pounds, four ounces and 12 grams. I take argument from the place given to the dolphin to believe that a similar dolphin must have been figured in the missing part. I say, because it was cut, because you can see a marked line and just above it the mark of the ax to arrange the bronze for the blow of the mallet. The entire quadrilateral must therefore have weighed an eight to nine pounds. It is notable that in this quadrilateral bar the thickness of the burr protruding between the two brackets is the same from top to bottom, and regular. There is so far no bronze of this class so elegant and symmetrical.” (Machine aided translation)
Given that it is in the supplement and not the main text we can perhaps assume it came to light in the early 1880s as Garrucci was finishing his work. And… yes, Haeberlin was able to see (or at least get a cast) of the bar itself and says it came out of the Tiber in 1883 and then was acquired by Gnecchi…
The drawing is much more attractive than the actual piece as is too often the way. I wonder where it is today? I’d love a better photograph. The Rome provenance is very important to associate this type of bar with the city and its monetary history.
Haeberlin records just one purchase from Pasinati in 1895, an RRC 18/1 piece. Notice however under no. 46 that Stettiner (a name familiar from just above!) sold Haeberlin one of his Nemi pieces. I wonder how much of the Nemi material ended up with Stettiner (someone else to track down).
His 1888 subscription to RIN gives me his first name, Francesco.
He was already active by 1870 when he is mentioned for his possession a large bronze strigil with the handle in the shape of a woman recently excavated at Praeneste.
He also had a number of note worthy Cista from Praeneste (cf. Étude sur Préneste, ville du Latium, par M. Emmanuel Fernique v.17, p. 168-169).
There are two Pasinati metal engravers listed in the Rome directory of commercial artisans from 1866.
To be continued…
I’ve now reweighed all of his semisses of RRC 14 and 18 and all the triens of 18 a total of 60 specimens. Three were gross outlier and I’ve excluded them. The first two were early yesterday and thus I suspect might be user error (i.e. me getting used the handwriting and scales etc…). The other was the last coin of today not in Haeberlin’s printed volume but with his handwritten weight on the specimen.
Of the 57 remaining weights the average difference from reweighing is .11%, BUT for a full half of the readings the difference falls between .07% and .1%. We might also note that in 50 of the 57 cases Haeberlin’s weight is slightly lower than the new weight. This trend in the data suggests that there is a simple very slight calibration error either of his scale or mine.
Long and the short of it is that I think we should trust his weights and I’m not sure it is worth my time to keep up my systematic reweighing.
—
Other thoughts. The Semisses of RRC 18 are more consistent in quality and character than those of RRC 14. Case in point, all of Haeberlin’s RRC 18/2 specimens have 12 o’clock design alignment, but while his RRC 14/2 has a a tendency towards 12 it is not stable at all:
The RRC 18/3s appear even more uniform in manufacture and fabric.
Another suggestive data trend is the difference in the number of spues for RRC 14/2 and RRC 18/2.
Of 16 specimens of RRC 14/2, 12 have only one spue, whereas just 4 have two.
Of the 19 specimens of RRC 18/2, 15 have two spues, where as just 5 have one.
I take this to be evidence of experimentation in the manufacture process to refine techniques, but I see no difference in the number of voids at least in quantification terms. I’d want to put the two trays out in front of me together, perhaps impossible, to eye ball if the quality of the casting seems different.
I also notice looking at all the RRC 18 semisses together a two different diameters. Most fall in the 48-50 mm range, but three are much bigger up at 55-58 mm. The wider ones also seem thinner. I want to keep an eye on this.
I’ve been spending time with Haberlin’s own aes grave collection here in Berlin. The really lovely thing about it is that I get to see many specimens of the same type at the same time to really get a feel for the characteristics and deep variation between the various specimens.
Many thoughts, too many for this blog post. But here is one. There is an uncanny similarity in size and shape between the wings of Pegasus on RRC 18/2 and the wing on Mercury’s helmet on RRC 14/1.
Also Haeberlin seems much more devoted to recording provenance for Asses than for smaller denominations. I have a strong suspicion that he acquired more of the Nemi material than his catalogue reports. I’d need to access his papers on some future trip to really know.
Finally thus far with only the occasional outlier (perhaps one specimen in 20) his weights are proving to be accurate against a modern well calibrated scale to a standard deviation of c. 0.4%. That is pretty darn accurate. But given the outliers which have been up to 6% difference, I feel I best keep re weighing as go.
I’m not even getting to his cast collection this trip–he tried to take a cast of every single aes grave he was not able to purchase that he ever help. Each cast has details of the original on the reverse. An amazing tool for provenance research given how few specimens relatively speaking he was able to illustrate on his plates.
I am about to move on to RRC 14 and 18 today, but as I sit down this morning and start closing tabs I wanted to jot down this thought
What follows are three images of the same Ariminium Quinunx specimen sold repeatedly in the early 20th century. As the photos are taken from casts rather than the aes grave itself the edges particularly the spue breaks present slightly differently.
The above specimen caught my attention because of how the spue break with a little peak in a center reminded me of this specimen owned by Haeberlin and now in Berlin which I was handling yesterday.
Basically I’m toying with the idea if such patterns in the spue breaks could be reflective of something in the manufacturing process that was consistent or typical…
I also find it interesting that this Ariminum quinunx was unknown to Haeberlin but appeared almost immediately aft his work was published from the collection of von Baldinger – Stuttgart
Haeberlin says:
“One of these two pieces is probably identical to the example from the Bianchi collection in Rimini listed by Mommsen p. 250 with a weight of 157 grams (after Tonini, Storia di Rimini, P. 21 = 5 ounces, 13 den.). Furthermore, No. 2 is unmistakably the original of the illustrations at Marchi CI. IV, Tav. I, No. 3 and at Garrucci Tav. LIX, 3, which Garrucci’s weight statement on page 31 “157 gr.” is also correct. On the other hand, the indication of origin of Garrucci’s “Museo di Pesaro” is based on an error, as this museum neither owns such a Quatrunx nor, according to the available lists, has ever owned it”
(machine aided translation)
I am interested in Haeberlin’s certitude that his specimen–now Berlin 18237653, photographed, but not yet up on IKMK–is the same known to Marchi and also appearing in Garrucci.
The reason for my interest is that I had thought the Marchi/Garrucci drawing of the Kircher/Pesaro specimen looked very much like the one sold as part of Garrucci’s own collection in the Hirsch 1914 sale as lot 641. See earlier post.
Haeberlin is likely right rather than myself. His argument about weight convinces me. Garrucci’s coin is listed in the sale as weighing 132g.
BUT in another way perhaps we are both correct in noticing the similarities to the earlier drawings. I think the two coins could have been made from the same mold.
When thinking about these types of comparisons I often like to make on image transparent and try out overlapping the two images. The lighting of the two specimens in these two old photographs is very different on from another but it still helps to show the similarity of the lines and patterns in the design.
Another possibility is that Ariminum used a stamp to create the coin mold. The similarity doesn’t mean one is copied from the other in modern times but of course we have to consider that possibility too.
I’d also not the ‘similarity’ of the known objects to the earlier drawings may also result from the fact that all the quatrunx I’ve held in this series all have a very similar top sprue break on the head side that aligns with the bottom of the sword and scabbard side. So the drawing is capturing common artifact of manufacture.
And just as an aside as I worked through these coins I reweighed them and was delighted with how very cases was there anything even close to a 1% difference. Only one real outlier and I think here Haeberlin might have made a copy error.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 
