Athenian Commercial Weights: A History of Museum Collections and a General Overview of the Corpus

From the archaic period until the adoption of the Roman weight system in the 1st c. BCE, Athenian weights form a consistent and unique set among ancient Greek commercial weights. On the one hand, they make up the most important corpus of ancient commercial weights with around eight hundred objects in several museum collections. On the other hand, unlike other Greek cities, the symbols on Athenian weights do not represent the parasemon, the city emblem of Athens, but refer to precise denominations. Using symbols in conjunction with denominations is a system that facilitates commercial transactions for the illiterate, making them more efficient and expedient. I have had the opportunity to study most of the Athenian weights kept in Greek and European museum collections and am now able to present the development of the museum collections and offer a better overview of this vast corpus. However, before describing the history of the collections and outlining the corpus, I will quickly review the main characteristics of Athenian commercial weights