Mast‐Step Coins among the Romans

Abstract

The archaeological evidence of more than a dozen ancient shipwrecks indicates that the tradition of placing a coin inside the mast‐step of a ship's hold probably originated with the Romans. The mast‐step coin phenomenon, which persisted through the Middle Ages and continues in various forms today, has often been characterized according to the modern concept of ‘luck’. The custom was, however, not one of an exclusively maritime nature; rather, it was ultimately derived from a long‐standing religious tradition that can be traced back to the consecration of the earliest Greek temples.

© 2007 The Author

Key words:

• mast‐step
• coin
• Roman
• shipwreck
• votive

Acknowledgments

This paper grew out of a graduate seminar in Greek and Roman Numismatics taught by Professor John Kroll at the University of Texas at Austin. Since that time, it has benefited from the insights of numerous colleagues, including Elizabeth Greene, Peter Kuniholm, Xavier Nieto, Irena Radić, Richard Steffy (whose fondness for the subject is epitomized by his coining of the phrase ‘riggy bank’), Ken Trethewey, and Cynthia Werner. I also thank the Glasscock Centre for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for inviting me to share this paper as part of a faculty colloquium, which resulted in several key improvements.

Notes

1 Adams and Black (2004: 245–7, figs 16, 17) illustrate a Portuguese silver coin minted during the reign of Alphonso III (1248–1279) from the mast‐step of a medieval wreck at St. Peter Port in Guernsey (Channel Islands). Crumlin‐Pedersen (1979: 25) references the discovery of two coins from the Gdansk region in the Baltic, found in the mast‐step of a 14th‐century cog at Vejby, Denmark. A more recent find is that of a French silver coin, struck between 1440 and 1456, found embedded in a forward portion of the keel from a 15th‐century ship at Newport, Wales. Henningsen (1965) details at least a dozen examples of the custom in ships and shipwrecks of the 16th to 20th centuries, and an unconfirmed report of a Roman coin in the mast‐step of a dugout discovered in 19th‐century Penzance, Cornwall, appeared in the Mariner's Mirror (1920: 222).

2 Early reports on the Titan wreck (Benoit, 1958; Tailliez, 1960; Tailliez, 1961; Tailliez, 1965) mention the discovery of two bronze coins, but give no indication that either came from the ship's mast‐step.

3 Beltrame kindly informs me that a concretion found in the mast‐step proved to be empty when x‐rayed, making it impossible to state with certainty that the object was in fact a coin. A Table comparable to the one provided here appears in Beltrame (2002: 71).

4 Xavier Nieto‐Prieto, who generously provided images of the mast‐step coin from Cap del Volt, reports that the coin appears to be of silver‐plated bronze.

5 According to Andrej Gaspari of the University of Ljubljana, the coin was found in the shoe of piling no. 153, extracted for dendrochronological sampling. I extend my thanks to Peter Kuniholm, Director of the Aegean Dendrochronology Project at Cornell University, for informing me about this unique find.

6 Gager (1992: 18) notes that magical papyri and lead curse tablets were routinely deposited in rivers, streams, and at sea, as illustrated by the accumulation of thousands of votive coins in the river Liris near Minturnae, Italy (Metcalf, 1974; Houghtalin, 1984). Katzev (2005: 79) mentions the discovery of a folded lead sheet tucked inside a lead envelope and nailed to a timber inside the hold of the Hellenistic ship wrecked off the coast of Kyrenia, Cyprus.

7 Graf (1997: 171) observes that ‘to deposit a figurine under the doorstep is a way of making certain that the victim will, sooner or later, get into contact with it’.

8 Though there exists little hard data for the height and weight of ancient masts, an interesting recent discovery from Olbia, Sardinia is a 7.6‐m‐long lower section of a mast, dated by associated finds to the third quarter of the 1st century AD (Riccardi, 2002). The diameter of the Olbia mast, at 42 cm, is almost twice that of the mast‐foot recovered from the Dramont E wreck (Santamaria, 1995: 164–71), suggesting to Riccardi (2002: 269) that the mast from Olbia was probably a fixed type between 12 and 15 m tall.

9 The archaeological evidence from ancient burials offers some conspicuous variations on the literary theme of Charon's obol, including the use of coins as jewellery, and the presence of a lone silver (or gold) coin alongside over a hundred bronze issues in the same grave (a gratuity?, as suggested by Robinson 1942: 205). That the tradition continued into the Byzantine era is evidenced by two 9th‐century graves at Aphrodisias, Turkey, each containing a skeleton holding a single Byzantine follis in one hand (pers. comm. numismatist Oliver Hoover).

10 Historiae 4.53. Scholarly disagreement about the translation of argenti aurique stipes et metallorum primitiae stems from the meaning of stipes and the author's use of both ‐que and et. Heubner (1976: 127–8) is right, I think, in maintaining that stipes is ‘geprägte Geldmünzen’ and that the et clearly differentiates stipes from their forerunner, primitiae metallorum.

11 The allied phenomenon of the foundation deposit, not under consideration in this paper, can be traced back to the pre‐monetary societies of Minoan Crete, Assyria, and Achaemenid Persia.

12 The exact date of the Artemision coins has been a subject of much debate but is variously placed within the 7th century BC (Robinson, 1951: 164–5; Kagan, 1982; Price, 1983; Karweise, 1991). Of course, the discovery also begets broader questions about the motive(s) behind and purpose(s) of coining bullion in Archaic Greece, which are outside the scope of this paper but have been addressed most recently by Kurke (1999) and Kim (2001).

13 Ancient sources (Livy, 40.52.4; Macrobius, 1.10.10) and religious calendars record the dedication, in 179 BC, of a temple to the lares permarini, the protectors of sailors and those who travelled by sea. For the location of the temple in the Campus Martius, see Zevi (1997).