there is large agreement among scholars. It looks also probable that the object should have a religious implication: an instrument permeated by religious ritualism, as the oath could well be employed in legal practice at the time of the object, as seems supported by linguistic analysis. The usage of the oath in archaic times as an instrument of private civil law could have been widespread, even though the issue has not yet been thoroughly analysed. Even though in the inscription there is no segment directly reminiscent of the dialogic formula of the sponsio, i.e. "spondes tu ...?", "spondeo!", internal and external evidence allow the assumption of the enactment of a matrimonial sponsio. Such a usage of oaths is attested in later literary sources. Besides the trace of a sponsio as the legal function of the object, Dumézil would also see that of providing a piece evidence, i.e. a probatory attitude. Servius in his commentary to the Aeneid writes that, before the introduction of the matrimonial tablets, in Latium the parties used to exchange tokens of pledge (symbola) on which they stated as a promise that they agreed to the marriage and nominated guarantors (sponsores). To the same time of the regal period is ascribed the introduction of the Greek use of double scriptures, tesserae. The sponsio is one of the most ancient forms of verbal undertaking of obligation and its religious nature is acknowledged, as well as its connection with betrothal. The ancient sources are in agreement that the archaic sponsalia had a religious nature. Brent Vine's study which focuses on the linguistic analysis of the word of the first sentence and of the segment of the third lends support to such an interpretation: he argues that mitat would be a form of a frequentative verb mitare based on a past participle in -to of an IE root *meɨ̯, with the meaning of 'exchange'. Semantically this frequentative should be considered factitive, thence arriving at a verb that would mean 'to cause to be given in exchange', hence 'to give (in exchange)'. Vine's analysis of the segment fits the hypothesis of an exchange of symbola equally well. He argues that a word could be isolated on the grounds of the single spelling of geminates which is considered normal by linguists for the archaic period. This he proposes to understand as reflecting a substantivised *méi̯-no-, meaning 'something given in exchange, gift' from