Anonymous, circa late 1st BC-1st century AD. Tessera or Game Token (Bone, 29 mm, 4.09 g). Bearded head of Nilus to right. Rev. X / NIΛOC / I in three lines. Cf. L. A. Pitcher and C. Bianchi: Roman Game Finds from Cremona (Italy), in: Board Game Studies Journal 16.1 (2022), p. 208 (for a set of 15 similar tesserae with various gods on the obverse numbered I-XV and A-IE, respectively). Unpublished and apparently unique, a highly interesting piece. Minor scratches and some edge chipping, otherwise, very fine.
Bone tesserae bearing images of deities, rulers, or personifications on one side and numerals on the other are known from widely dispersed regions of the Roman Empire. Complete or nearly complete sets have been recovered from burials at Kerch in Crimea, Ukraine, and at Brindisi and Lecce in southern Italy; their pieces are numbered from 1 to 15 in parallel Latin and Greek notation, I-XV and Α-ΙΕ respectively. The present example shows the bearded head of a man facing right on the obverse and the three-line inscription X / ΝΙΛΟC / Ι on the reverse. The two outer signs denote the same value, 10, first in Latin and then in Greek numerical notation. The intervening legend ΝΙΛΟC, conventionally written ΝΙΛΟΣ, explicitly identifies the figure as Nilus, the personification of the Nile. The mature, bearded head conforms to the standard Greco-Roman iconography of a river god, while the inscription ensures the subject’s identification even where the facial features are not individually distinctive. This combination of a figural obverse, bilingual numbering, and an identifying Greek legend is characteristic of the so-called Alexandrian counters; see E. Alföldi-Rosenbaum, Alexandriaca: Studies on Roman Game Counters III, in: Chiron 6 (1976), pp. 205-239. On the evidence of imperial portraits and securely dated archaeological contexts, their main period of production is generally placed between the late Caesarian period and the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, approximately 45 BC to AD 68. Finds from later contexts nevertheless indicate that such pieces could remain in circulation or be preserved into the second century AD. Their distribution extends from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean through the Black Sea region and Italy to Gaul, Spain, and areas north of the Alps. The image of Nilus and the Greek identifying legend clearly place our piece within an Alexandrian-Egyptian visual and cultural tradition, but they do not demonstrate that it was made in Alexandria or that the individual object came from Egypt. The term 'Alexandrian' is therefore best understood as an iconographic and cultural designation for an object type distributed throughout the Roman world; see C. Bianchi, Les jetons historiés dits ‘alexandrins’: bilan et propositions, in: V. Dasen and M. Vespa (eds.), Jouer dans l’Antiquité classique, Liège 2021, pp. 179-203. Although these objects are now commonly interpreted as gaming counters, neither the nature of the game nor its rules are known. The numerals may have indicated values or positions within a set, perhaps used in a board game, a game involving the drawing of pieces, or some form of combination game, but no fixed relationship between individual numbers and particular image types has yet been established.