Gold 10 Asses Owl series II

Populonia, the only Etruscan city known to have struck its own coinage directly from locally smelted iron-ore revenues, produced this diminutive gold piece during a period when Roman military pressure was reshaping the political geography of the Italian peninsula entirely. The denomination fits within a bronze-referenced system unusual among Etruscan issues, where gold fractions were valued against the as rather than against Greek weight standards.

The Vecchi classification places this in the second Owl series, distinguished from the first by subtle die characteristics documented in Italo Vecchi's 1995 corpus.