The Tablettes Albertini and the Value of the solidus in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D.

Abstract

The discovery in 1928 of what are now known as the Tablettes Albertini threw a flood of new light on economic conditions in late Roman imperial times. The Tablettes consist of a potful of legal documents, written on wooden tablets and dating from the last three years of the reign of the Vandal king Gunthamund (484–496), which were found at some not precisely ascertainable spot on the frontier between Algeria and Tunis. They include the details of a marriage settlement, a contract for the sale of a slave, a number of deeds relating to the sale of olive trees and other agricultural property, and a list of personal names with sums of money noted against each. Many of the tablets are no more than fragments and their decipherment and interpretation involve problems of great complexity. Two of them, and an assessment of the extent and value of the whole collection, were published in 1930 by Professor Eugène Albertini, of the University of Algiers, and he continued to collect material for their definitive study up to his death in 1941. In 1952 they were elaborately published by four French scholars, who subjected every aspect of their material features and their contents—epigraphy, language, law, economic significance—to minute analysis and review.