Akan Goldweight (Abrammuo)
The Akan goldweight, the abrammuo, is a small cast-brass piece used from the fifteenth century onward to weigh gold dust in the trade of present-day Ghana, one of the great mercantile tools of the Atlantic world. The weights were cast by the lost-wax method, and the figurative ones depict animals, people, proverbs, objects and scenes of daily life in miniature, each one with a story to tell. The art of the weights lay in the proverb: a man could hand his companion a weight of a crocodile with a bird, and the pair would 'speak' the proverb it illustrated, making the weights a language in the ma