Ashanti/Asante Gold Dust Weights

Nine Cast Brass Gold Dust Weights

weights: 3g-27g

This collection of nine Akan gold weights is distinguished by its variation, and the excellent patina of each weight.

The collection includes a desirable swastika weight. The swastika was referred to by the Akan as a monkey’s foot. Other weights have forms that include a mudfish, a tortoise, a sawfish, pyramids and other abstract and decorative solids.

Related weights are illustrated in Robbins & Nooter (1989, p. 197) and in Phillips (2010).

Personal weights such as these were used in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa. Principally, small weights were used to weigh gold dust which became the currency used to settle everyday transactions. Each party to any transaction would typically use their own weights – largely because one could trust one’s own weights in the absence of any government certified weighing system. The negotiating process not only would include the cost in gold dust of the items being transacted over but a comparison of weights, debate over the scales used, and the purity of the gold dust (gold often was adulterated with brass filings). Even transactions as rudimentary as buying vegetables in a street market necessitated this process.

Gold weights were cast in brass or bronze. They were used by the Akan who occupy a large part of West Africa including parts of Ghana and the Ivory Coast and include many sub-ethnic groups such as the Baule and the Asante (Ashanti). Gold became an important commodity which gave rise to Ghana’s old colonial name of the Gold Coast. The region was known as the Gulf of Guinea, and in England, a gold coin worth twenty-one shillings became known as a guinea (Philiips, 2010).

This collection presents a comparatively early set of weights with obvious age and with good variety.

Phillips, T., African Goldweights: Miniature Sculptures from Ghana 1400-1900, Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 2010.

Robbins, W.M. & N.I. Nooter,

African Art in American Collections, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

UK art market