Four Roman Key Rings and Lock Keys

Roman, Imperial to Late Roman period. A quartet of small ancient keys, each built around a finger loop so that the owner could carry a lock's answer on the hand rather than at the belt. The largest, of bronze, presents a broad flat bar rising to a toothed bit above a heavy circular hoop. Beside it sits a lead-alloy example with a stubby projecting ward, a brass ring whose square bezel is pierced with a geometric openwork lever pattern, and a light green copper-alloy loop terminating in a splayed three-tined bit. Such keys opened the small tumbler locks that secured jewelry caskets, strongboxes, and cupboards in Roman households, and their miniature scale made them personal property in the most literal sense. Wear-smoothed surfaces and green cuprous patina attest to long burial. Roman lift-and-turn and rotary locks worked by raising or sliding internal tumblers, so a key's bit was cut as a small array of teeth or pierced wards matched to a single lock plate. Wearing that key on the finger was both practical and pointed: Roman law and household custom vested the keys of the storerooms in the materfamilias, and a ring key on the hand announced who held authority over what was locked away. The openwork bezel on the brass example, cut in a meander-like lever pattern, belongs to a widespread Imperial type in which decoration and mechanism are the same thing, the pierced motif serving as the working ward. Testing of the four indicates a genuinely mixed metallurgy: bronze for the largest, a lead alloy for the second, brass for the openwork ring, and a copper alloy for the smallest. That spread is typical of Roman utilitarian metalwork, where founders drew on whatever scrap and ore stock was at hand. Item # 204769

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