A few weeks ago, Navarrese archaeology was shocked again. The Aranzadi Science Society announced the finding in Saint-Jean-le-Vieux (France) of a gold ring with a carving practically identical to another recovered in 2018 on this side of the Pyrenees, in Zaldua, not far from the place where Mercedes Unzu and María Jesús Peréx, in the 1980s, documented the Iturissa road station.

Acquiring jewels that, from India, were distributed through the easternmost markets of the Mediterranean and exhibiting them was synonymous with distinction in Roman times. Even the women of Rome, in 195 B.C., invaded the forum of the capital of the Republic in protest when the Oppia law forbade them to boast of the wealth of the families of which they were the head, restricting the issue of jewelry they could wear. Seneca, in fact, went so far as to affirm that some Roman women wore rings and earrings with a large part of the family patrimony. And, naturally, what happened in Rome and which was a manifestation of the so-called mundus muliebris, the "feminine universe", or of what the sources, specifically Tertullian, call the pompa muliebris, the "feminine pomp", also happened in the Basque territory. Fundamentally because it was connected with a fluvial port, that of Caesar Augusta, Zaragoza, to which luxury articles arrived -like these jewels- for private consumption and also ornamental elements -like Greek, Egyptian or Turkish marbles, some counted among the most expensive of the Empire- that were used in the intense processes of monumentalization that, between Augustus and Trajan, lived cities like Pompelo, Santa Criz de Eslava, Cara, Andelo or Los Bañales de Uncastillo. All of them are enclaves in which, to a greater or lesser extent, articles of Roman jewelry have appeared and can be seen in the museums and exhibitions in these places.

As shown by the two rings discovered and made known by Aranzadi, this circulation of products, this first great globalization of the West - the second of Antiquity after the one developed by Alexander of Macedonia centuries ago towards the East - also rested on the mobility the people who made these materials circulate and who, with their demand, contributed to make them fashionable. The inscriptions, as we know in Navarre as source essential source for the study of Antiquity, even give names to some of its protagonists. If already in 89 B.C. horsemen of Basque cities, surely Segienses, from Ejea de los Caballeros, embarked in the predecessor of Caesar Augusta, then called Salduie, to travel to the surroundings of the Italic Abruzzi to help Rome in the uprising of its allies, it is recorded that, already in imperial times, a Cascantinus, from Cascante, landed in Augusta Emerita, Merida, the westernmost provincial capital of the whole Empire. It is also known that a Curnoniensis, from Los Arcos, ended his days in Burdigala, now Bordeaux, an important city in Aquitaine, and that distinguished members of the local elite of Cara - such as Postumia Nepotiana - or Pompellus - such as Gaius Cornelius Valens - traveled to Tarraco, Tarragona, to hold important positions in the provincial administration. The latter even went to Sirmium, in present-day Serbia, to meet with framework Aurelius on a matter of interest to the province of Tarraco, which he served, at his own expense.

According to Tacitus, there were also Basques in the infantry cohorts recruited by Galba, and who, as Iñaki Zugarrondo has recently novelized, played an important role in the battles of the year of the four emperors, 68-69 A.D. Members of those cohorts of Basques later served Rome in Pannonia, present-day Hungary; Britannia, United Kingdom; or Mauretania, Morocco. The individual mobility generated, therefore, commercial contacts without practically borders, with Aquitaine and with all the corners of the mare nostrum and, with them, also, exchange fashions that forged a shared, common, global style of life. This is manifested again, with golden sparkles in this case, in the happy finding in Saint-Jean-le-Vieux which, by virtue of this globalization, has its twin in Zaldua.