Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 2).djvu/315

 gramma or scruple = about 20 grains; <, drachme or Holea = 3 scruples; [Greek: go], oungia or uncia = ounce; [Greek: li], libra = pound.

The drachm sign in Dr. Wall's opinion is a reminiscence of an Egyptian symbol for half, somewhat similar to our figure 3,. He supposes that the Greeks adopted this sign to represent the half of the Egyptian medicinal weight unit, which according to the best authorities was equivalent to a double drachm. In a treatise by Ebers on the Weights and Measures of the Ebers Papyrus, he estimates the weight unit at 6·064 grammes (say 103 grains). He explains, however, that the name of the weight is nowhere given in the Papyrus. I cannot say whether there is any evidence of the transfer of the Egyptian weights to Greek pharmacy, but the usual course of the travels of such characters was from the Egyptian hieratic or demotic writing to the Coptic, and thence to the Arabic. It appears certain, however, that the Arabic "dirhem" was adopted from the Greek "drachma."

The sign, which frequently occurs in the Ebers Papyrus, might quite easily and almost inevitably come to be written something like our ; but Ebers values it at two-thirds of a litre, where it is named as a fluid measure. He deduces this from the hypothesis that the is the hieratic equivalent of the hieroglyphic , dnat, or tenat.

Scribonius Largus, in the first century, and Apuleius in the second, both give [Greek: Z] as the Greek sign for a drachm in medical formulas. The former says this