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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 3746319, member: 74282&quot;]I purchased this group in a recent CNG e-sale but I&#039;m only just now getting around to sharing them. As a Roman Republic collector, these are an important bookend for my collection. For those who haven&#039;t seen or heard of these before, aes rude were the earliest form of money used in Italy as early as circa 800 BC. These were cast lumps of bronze traded by weight in a sort of barter economy. They could of course be traded like money or used as bronze bullion to make any number of items. The majority of known examples have been found on mainland Italy itself, often in hoards and votive deposits alongside aes signatum and aes grave, but they&#039;ve been found in Sicily and even Croatia which had important economic links with Italy during this time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some sources refer to these as &quot;unformed&quot; or having no particular form but that&#039;s not entirely true. When you look at aes rude, it&#039;s true that some seem to just be somewhat freely formed, perhaps by dumping molten bronze into water but you see many pieces that seem to have been broken off of ingots or other shaped objects like axe heads. In particular one piece I&#039;ll show below seems to have been broken off a small bar-shaped ingot. Others have flat surfaces I believe are tool marks and were likely also cleaved from larger pieces but not as obvious what those larger pieces looked like.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve wanted to add a few of these pieces for a while and have studied them to the point that I felt I had a reasonably good eye for what they should look like... But between a lot of pieces that either were old but didn&#039;t seem to be aes rude, seemed likely modern or I felt were possibly authentic but sold by sellers that I didn&#039;t feel had the right expertise I was just never quite comfortable with what was available on the market. When I saw this group of 5 pieces, ex Andrew McCabe collection and ex RBW collection, and all of which had the sort of shapes and patina I&#039;d seen of known good pieces, I knew I had to have them. Thankfully the group hammered at a relatively low price, around $45 each after buyers fee so not bad at all given the relatively large weight of each piece and especially given the excellent provenance to two collectors whose opinions I greatly respect on these types.</p><p><br /></p><p>I couldn&#039;t figure out a good way to photograph these with my usual setup so I decided to take a couple big group photos as well as one close up of the middle piece which I think was</p><p>&nbsp;cut off a larger ingot. I&#039;ve also attached the CNG group lot picture. The weight of each one is between 55g and 95g as labeled in the picture, placing them all in the sextans to quadrans range in terms of weight.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1005099[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1005100[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1004868[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1004869[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Italy, anonymous, Æ Aes Rude(55.0g, 55.7g, 69.5g, 80.3g, 95.0g), before 4th century B.C.. Irregular cast bronze with no stamp or mark of value. Vecchi ICC 1</p><p>Ex Andrew McCabe collection, ex RBW collection (before 2010)</p><p><br /></p><p>Post any Italian cast aes-whatever bronze you may have or anything relevant.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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