Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/169

 *ment of cities and general commerce that the price of cattle would begin to fluctuate.

But even when such variation in price arose, it made no difference as regards the weight standard. The unit had already long been fixed and it remained unaltered, just as the beaver skin of account still means only two shillings, although a real beaver skin is now worth many times that amount.

Another reason why the price of cattle would remain stationary would be that in early times as all the cows were kept under more or less similar conditions of food, and there was no attempt at the development of superior breeds, there would be little difference in the value of animals of the same age.

The connection between the cow and the gold unit is rendered all the more probable not merely by the fact so often noticed that the words for money in different languages originally meant cattle, but by the remarkable fact that the earliest known weights are in the form of cattle. The relation between weight and money must always be close, but it comes still more prominently into view, when as yet there is no coinage, but gold and silver pass by weight alone. If then the value of a cow formed the first gold unit, we can at once understand why the first weights took the form of oxen and sheep.

It was not for mere artistic reasons, for whilst such animal weights appear on Egyptian paintings, the numerous known Egyptian weights are of a very conventional form, as we shall find below. Doubtless the horns and ears made a cow's head exceedingly ill-suited for a weight, and in course of time utility prevailed over the traditional idea that the weight unit ought to take the shape of the animal, whose value in gold it was meant to represent.

The following table sums up briefly the results of this chapter:

Homeric ox-unit              = 130-135 grains of gold. Roman ox (5th cent. )    = 135       "         " Sicilian (5th cent. )    = 135       "         " Ancient German               = 120       "         "