Roman lead tags

A ce jour près de 800 objets en plomb ont été retrouvés à Bliesbruck . Cela fait de cette collection une des plus importantes de ce type d’artefacts trouvée en France. Les artefacts présentés dans cette étude illustrent la grande diversité des objets en plombs et leurs usages multiples : profanes et sacrés, domestiques et commerciaux.

While almost all lead tags from Siscia share identical morphological characteristics and while most of their inscriptions correspond to defined patterns with some variations, there are exceptions and oddities such as the tag presented in this paper. Despite uncertainties as far as reading is concerned – the surface of the tag is badly scratched – the inscription clearly does not have a commercial character since there is no price, nor any abbreviations usually recorded on those tags, referring to dimensions, weights, dyes, garments, wool or any other trade items or service available in the textile craft. It must have been a personal note addressed to a person the author of the message seemingly urged to meet. Did somebody use the opportunity to slip a message to his sweetheart while meeting each other in a fullonica or a tinctoria?

This paper discusses two chance finds from the site of Štrbinci in the vicinity of Đakovo in NE Croatia, possibly located on the place of the Roman small town of Certissia. These are two Roman lead tesserae, i. e. lead tags with incised inscriptions pointing to their use in the textile industry, broadly dated to between the late 1 st and the early 3 rd centuries AD. Such finds are not uncommon in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, but these two specimens are the first recorded tags of that type in Pannonia Inferior.

Recommender systems usually operate on similarities between recommended items or users. Tag based recommender systems utilize similarities on tags. The tags are however mostly free user entered phrases. Therefore, similarities computed without their semantic groundings might lead to less relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study a semantic grounding used for tag similarity calculus. We show a comprehensive analysis of semantic grounding given by 20 ontologies from different domains. The study besides other things reveals that currently available OWL ontologies are very narrow and the percentage of the similarity expansions is rather small. WordNet scores slightly better as it is broader but not much as it does not support several semantic relationships. Furthermore, the study reveals that even with such number of expansions, the recommendations change considerably.

Duje Rendić-Miočević thoroughly studied the issue of peregrine polyonymy in Dalmatia, an anthroponymic practice observed
among peregrines in other areas of the Roman Empire as well. The inscriptions preserved on the lead tags found in Siscia might also contain names which could be interpreted in the same way but one has to be very cautious when interpreting succinct inscriptions which were never meant to indicate the full nomenclature of the clients and craftsmen mentioned on the tags.

In professional literature, Sisak is known for its lead
finds which are both numerous and have various applications.
Other lead finds have recently been upstaged
by increasingly numerous finds of Roman
commodity tags. Sisak is one of the largest sites of
Roman commodity tags. The largest amount of commodity
tags found so far in one location originates
from the archaeological site St. Quirinus in Sisak,
which has been systematically excavated since 2003.
the largest part of the site is covered with Roman architecture:
an open square with a temple, a part with
residential architecture, northern city walls, monumental
walls on the north entrance into Siscia with
an entrance arch and Roman road (cardo maximus),
pedestals, wooden pilots, part of a defence ditch.
Professional literature refers to these as étiquettes en
plomb, Bleietiketten, etichette plumbee iscritte, lead labels,
lead tags, and, in Croatia, these are called robne
markice or olovne tesere. ² ese are rectangular plates
of similar dimensions, mostly from 30 to 40 mm
in length and 15 to 25 mm in width, always with
a round perforation in one corner, sometimes even
with two or even three perforations due to the fracture
of the ª rst or second hole. Owing to these perforations,
the plate could be tied to clothing by virtue
of rope (plant/animal tissue) or metal wire. ² ese
plates have an engraved inscription on at least one
side, but mostly contain text on both sides. Traces of
earlier inscriptions are often visible because tags of
this type were rewritable: the older inscription would
be erased (more or less thoroughly) and a new inscription
would be engraved over it. Reading the inscription
is thus all the more di¸ cult because, even if
the plate is well preserved, it is often hard to discern
which letters belong to which inscription. ² e tags
are of various types, they mostly indicate names of
products (tunic, coat, cape, wool, etc.) and colours
(black, white, red, etc.), mostly in abbreviated form, quantity or weight, sometimes even a certain work
or mission, or the price of the service or product.
Personal names are often shown on these commodity
tags, but the exact role of the persons thereon is not
always clear: they might be clients, owners of trades
or manufactures, owners of goods, workers or slaves
responsible for performing the work or processing
the goods. These objects are of strictly utilitarian and
unofficial purpose and limited writing space. The applied
abbreviations were known to the professionals,
a group of people who used the local spoken language,
which makes it more di¸ cult for today’s explorer
to decode the tags.
The commodity tags from this site which have been
analysed so far are related to the textile industry; some
of them contain indications related to wool, some
mention finished clothing which needs to be re-dyed
or sewn or subjected to some other action. The finding
of these lead objects also reveals the existence of
various fabric processing workshops on the territory
of Siscia. The existence of workshops in this territory
is not surprising because Siscia played an important
role in Antique times. Fabric processing workshops
(fulleries) - fullonicae, are an interesting and insuf-
ficiently known aspect of tertiary activities of the Antique
world. At this level of exploitation, it is hard to
draw a conclusion on the extents of the trade in textile
products near and within Siscia. The weights and
prices mentioned on the commodity tags which have
been analysed so far reveal no evidence of wholesale
trade; however, further processing might still provide
evidence of significant extents of trade.
Future explorations of the today’s city of Sisak, both
on right and left bank of the Kupa river, will provide
new insights into Antique life, and we hope it will
provide new insight into the economy and workshop
production of ancient Siscia.

Si presenta una nuova proposta di scioglimento di alcune fra le etichette in piombo rinvenute nel fiume Kupa a Sisak (Siscia, Pannonia). In particolare oggetto del contributo sono le etichette contraddistinte nel titulus dalla presenza di MVC, MVCI e MVCCI (gruppo 22).

The aim of this paper is to offer a new proposal for the resolution of some of lead tags found in the river Kupa in Sisak (Siscia, Pannonia). In particular, this paper deals with the lead tags bearing MVC MVCI and MVCCI in the titulus (group 22).

Na sisačkim se teserama spominje preko 900 pojedinaca, valja pretpostaviti mahom klijenata lokalne tekstilne industrije. Iako većina ima latinska imena, zabilježen je i velik postotak ljudi čija se imena mogu smatrati domorodačkima, odnosno keltskima ili »ilirskima« u širem
smislu, što je očekivano u jugozapadnoj Panoniji. U ovom se radu ta zanimljiva problematika ne obrađuje cjelovito već se, kao svojevrsni hommage pokojnom profesoru Rendiću-Miočeviću, naglasak stavlja na pregled idionima koji se mogu interpretirati kao »ilirski«, to jest imena koja bi mogla pripadati epihorskoj antroponimiji stanovnika provincije Dalmacije i južne Panonije. Obrađuje se 59 imena od kojih se mnoga gotovo sigurno mogu smatrati »ilirskima«, no velik broj ipak ostaje dvojben, te samo hipotetski može biti doveden u vezu s »ilirskom« onomastikom. Tema je iznimno široka te svakako zaslužuje metodičniji pristup, pa bi ovaj rad u najboljem slučaju bio tek prvi korak, a valja se nadati da će daljnja istraživanja preuzeti lingvisti i filolozi.

While most Roman lead tags from Siscia kept in the Greek and Roman Department of the Zagreb Archaeological Museum contain information about individuals who appear to be clients of local fullers and dyers, some also provide more or less credible data about those clients’ likely origins. Inscriptions normally specify information about the garments, the service to be completed and the amount of money asked for payment, but the craftsmen also had to know to whom to return the merchandise. Since this data is usually restricted to personal names, one has to remain very cautious when conjecturing about the possible origin
of individuals mentioned on the tags. Nevertheless, in some cases, stating the ethnic origin seems to have been a useful piece of information allowing the craftsman to easily distinguish a client. Besides several inscriptions where the ethnic origin appears to be clearly emphasised, far more tags bear characteristic personal names which could imply a certain ethnic or regional background. Although onomastics might offer clues about somebody’s origin, it should not be considered as absolutely reliable evidence in this matter. To a certain extent it may reflect the ethnicity of an individual but nomenclature should never be equated either with a language or an ethnic origin. The ethnic or linguistic background certainly plays an important role in name-giving, but there are so many different aspects – cultural, sociological, formal, legal, to mention a few - involved in this custom that we cannot simply consider the linguistic aspect as the determining one. Thus, the overview given in this paper has no pretentions whatsoever to offer hard evidence and definite conclusions about the origins of people mentioned in the inscriptions incised on these lead tags.