Silver 5 Asses Male head series II: facing right, blank

Populonia, on the Etruscan coast of northern Tuscany, was the only Etruscan city known to have struck its own coinage rather than relying on imported or shared issues — a function almost certainly tied to its iron-smelting economy, which required a local medium for paying workers at the furnaces processing ore from Elba. The "blank" reverse designation here is not damage or omission; it is intentional, a convention of this series in which the second die was left uninscribed, placing all identifying weight on the obverse type alone.