- chapter 23: Numbers and reckoning –
The chronology traditionally assigned to his reign is compatible with that of the cast
bronze ingots marked with a branch-like decoration (“a ramo secco”), found all over Italy,
as well as Sicily, but concentrated in Etruria.^56 Actually these ingots seem to follow no
detectable weight pattern, and are usually found in fragments; moreover, they hardly
correspond to the expression signavit aes that Pliny refers to Servius Tullius, probably
meaning to say (quite mistakenly) that he struck coinage.^57 There are small, isolated and
episodic issues of gold and silver coinage, probably from the fi fth century bce and later;^58
but the only substantial issue is the massive gold and silver coinage of Populonia in the
fi rst half of the third century bce; in the same period, Populonia as well as Vetulonia
produced large bronze coinages. These, as well as the cast bronze coinage of Volaterrae
and the massive cast and struck bronze issues from inner Etruria, were based in principle
on a unit weighing roughly half a Roman pound; but the archaeological evidence shows
that they are all much earlier than the use of the unit at Rome in the last quarter of the
third century bce. There were also substantial struck bronze issues, similar, for example,
to those of Neapolis.
Some issues have legends referred to names of towns or, rarely, to names of private
people; but they are generally rather problematic.^59
A silver unit of 8.72 grams is presumably borrowed from the so-called Euboic-Attic
system,^60 a silver unit of 5.73 grams has been taken as “Asiatic”;^61 but we do not have
enough evidence to interpret these choices, and the subject would require much more
attention than what can be discussed in this short contribution^62.
It is at least clear than weight reductions within a particular coinage were common, as
at Rome and in Magna Graecia.^63 Two series, probably from Vulci, with the legend θezi
vel sim., show a ratio of 2 : 1 in weight (10.84 grams vs. 5.28 grams), but it is not clear
whether they are contemporary or sequential.^64
EPILOGUEAs expected, numbers were an important part of the daily life of the Etruscans, widespread
in religious practices and theory, but also used in architecture and law.
There is still some important evidence to be considered, coming from graffi ti with
numerals, present in epigraphy at least from the Orientalizing period. In this regard
it is interesting to see how one of the main uses of the alphabet since its introduction
in Etruria was for reckoning purposes: at the beginning of the seventh century bce the
bronze deposit of S. Francesco at Bologna contained several objects marked with single
letters or with numeral marks in order to be checked and counted by the craftsman who
owed them.^65
Similarly the series of decorated terracotta revetments of the temple of Portonaccio in
Veii were marked with syllabic groups of two or three letters (ca-ce-ci...on the right of
the roof and cra-cre-cri...on the left), whose function was simply numeral, as testifi ed by
the comparison with more recent revetment systems in Veii and elsewhere, which show
common numeral marks.
The numeral marking system in Etruria, developed during the Archaic age, originally
had single vertical lines for units and “X”’s for tens; then, by cutting the cross in half they
generated a mark for fi ve (an upside-down V), while the mark for 100 was obtained by
driving a vertical line through the middle of the cross; the bottom half of it became the
mark for 50 (identical to an upside down trident-shaped chi).^66