I need to improve my French, the translation works well enough to get a broad sense of the meaning, but any nuance is definitely lost.
Same here - not sure that my highschool
French really added much to the subtitles. One detail I didn't get is the composition of the "bronze" ingots; the screen of the (X-Ray fluorescence) device they were using displayed the top three most plentiful elements as "Cu 54%, Cl 17%, Pb 14%" but the translated subtitles only mentioned the copper and lead. 17% Cl (Chlorine) doesn't make much sense, but I'm not sure how to interpret what looked like "Cl" as Tin or Zinc.
There seem to have been three disjoint aspects to the cargo:
- the silver (10 = 15-20Kg total) and "bronze" (20 = 500Kg total) ingots
- the donative items (large gold
medallion, Constantinian solidi, silver medallions, gold belt buckle) (maybe personal property of someone hitching a ride with the shipment?)
- the ~1000 nummi +
aureusThe silver and bronze may have been headed for the nearby
mint, which is why the
alloy composition is interesting. The mints were all by rivers for ease of transportation, so receiving raw materials in this way would not be surprising. At first glance the quantities seem too low for a "
mint delivery", but given the 23 nearby wrecks they mentioned and that this boat
had easily taken on water with this size of load, maybe this was about the limit of an individual delivery? 500Kg of bronze would be about 1500
roman pounds, or ~150,000 coins at 1/96lb, but I recently read a production estimate of ~50,000 coins
per day from a single
officina, so that would only equate to three days production.
Ben