An abrammuo is a brass weight for gold dust, cast by lost wax: a beeswax model packed in clay, fired until the wax burns away, then filled from imported copper-zinc stock. Around three million were made across the Akan world. Geometric ones run a quarter to half an inch; figurative ones, like Princeton's two men, measure 4.5 × 2.3 × 2.6 cm.

The surface is the point. Centuries of handling burnished the raised detail to bright yellow and sank the recesses to olive-brown and near-black. Baule figures are told from Asante by their near-spherical heads. Each object carries a saying — the sculpture is the proverb's body, not its ornament.