The Metrological Systems of the Final Bronze Age Balance Weights and the Pre-Roman Coinage of Atlantic Iberia: A Shared Syrian Standard?

Abstract

The study departs from recent suggestions that locally produced balance weights from settlement sites in central Portugal, dated to the Final Bronze Age (1200-900 BCE) are based on a Late Bronze Age Syrian/Ugaritic metrological system (13th-12th c. BCE). These proposals have been based on the comparative studies of the weights of these Atlantic objects, but have not been examined rigorously in comparison with Near Eastern metrological systems, despite the claims they make. This has repercussions for the conclusions drawn so far. The present study has a threefold aim. First, it examines this hypothesis of a Syrian derivation of metrological systems underlying the local production of balance weights in Atlantic Iberian settlements (ca. 1200-900 BCE). Secondly, it investigates whether these local balance weights bear any metrological relationship to the balance weights of Phoenician typologies encountered in Atlantic Iberian sites of the colonial period (8th-6th c. BCE). Thirdly, taking as a case study the better documented evidence from Alcácer do Sal, it examines for the first time whether these metrological systems, in use for centuries in Atlantic Iberia, underly the metrologies of the earliest, pre-Roman, locallyminted coinage, which follows Phoenician iconography but is struck using the syllabary of the indigenous languages, developed in the 8th c. BCE as an adaptation of the Phoenician script. The study suggests that the dating of the earliest group of balance weights needs to be lowered. In addition, it documents a likely derivation of the metrological system of coinage from the Phoenician milieu of Iberia, rather than the 3rd c. BCE Carthaginian metrologies, as advocated so far. This is supported by the metrological continuity between balance weights and coinage, and the latter's iconography, as the present study documents.

The poster boys of antiquity’s “capitalism” shunning money? The spread of the alphabet in the Mediterranean as a function of a credit-based, maritime trade

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Las pesas de balanza de la Edad del Hierro conservadas en el Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid, España) en el contexto metrológico de la Europa occidental

“…Por último, en el suroeste de la península ibérica las pesas de balanza surgen durante los siglos XI-IX a. C. Se trata de piezas pequeñas de aleación de cobre de formas variadas, con predominio de las discoidales (Poigt, 2022a;Vilaça, 2011). Si bien su aparición se vincula tradicionalmente a los primeros contactos con los fenicios (Pappa, 2019), los pondera fenicios de la península ibérica suelen estar fabricados en plomo o en una aleación de cobre rica en plomo y suelen ser cúbicos o poliédricos (Vilaça, 2011;Poigt, 2022a), diferenciándose de los primeros.…”