The Carthage Treasure

Roman North Africa was one of the richest parts of the empire, yet it has yielded remarkably little of the silver its landowners must have eaten from. The exception is a small treasure found by chance on the Byrsa, the old citadel hill of Carthage later known as the Hill of St Louis, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Nobody recorded exactly when or how; it surfaces in the record when the great British Museum collector Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks acquired most of it, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1897. A few pieces went to the Louvre.

The treasure has 31 objects, modest beside the great Roman hoards of Britain and Gaul but chosen with taste. It combines the two halves of a Roman household's plate: the drinking service and the dining service. There are two flat dishes, two bowls with lively reliefs of shepherds and flocks round their rims, four tall-footed hemispherical bowls, a dozen spoons and a shallow patera with a frog engraved at its centre, an unusual and appealing motif.

One dish carries the key to its owners. Around its centre runs the inscription D D I CRESCONI CLARENT, read as a gift to the illustrious Cresconii. The Cresconii were a prominent Carthaginian family of the late Roman period, known from records of office-holders and churchmen, and the hoard is generally taken to be theirs. One spoon carries a Christian monogram, so the family was probably Christian.

The jewellery adds colour. A matching set of a necklace and earrings combines polygonal emeralds, sapphires and pearls on gold links; such gems were later restricted to imperial use. With it are a gold necklace, a ring, a cameo and engraved gems. The lidded bowls, about 12 cm high, are cleverly designed: the knob on the lid doubles as a foot, so the lid can be turned over and used as a dish. Close parallels have been found at Viminacium on the Danube.

Why the family buried their silver is not known. The usual suspects are religious strife in Africa around 400 and, more likely, the Vandal invasion: Gaiseric's army crossed from Spain in 429 and captured Carthage in 439, making it the capital of a Vandal kingdom. The French specialist François Baratte, who published the treasure with three colleagues in 2002, would place the hiding in the course of the fifth century. Whoever hid it did not come back.

Small as it is, the Carthage Treasure is the most spectacular find of late Roman silver from Africa, and it shows that the provincial elite there owned silver of the same fashions and quality as their peers in Rome, Gaul and the Balkans.