Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/171

 CHAPTER VII.

Subiectos Orientis orae Seras et Indos.

Carm. 12. 56.

We have now found that within the area where our weight standards arose the ox was universally diffused, and regarded as the chief and most general form of property and medium of exchange; that over the same area gold was found to be more or less equally distributed in antiquity; that the metallic unit is found in all cases adapted to the chief unit of barter, whether that be ox or reindeer, beaver skin, or squirrel, as soon as peoples have learned the use of metal; and finally that over our special area from the Atlantic to Central Asia the cow at various times and places retained a value which fluctuated only from 120 to 140 grains of gold. When therefore we recall the fact, also pointed out above, that the gold unit employed from Gaul to Central Asia was one that only fluctuated from 120 to 140 grains, and when we recollect further that this unit in the ancient Greek Epic is called not a talent but an ox, when prices, and not merely the actual ingots of gold are mentioned, the conclusion follows that not merely in Greece but in all the other countries the gold unit represented originally simply the conventional value of the cow as the immemorial unit of barter.

Next follows an important question, How was the primitive weight standard fixed? In other words, how did mankind arrive at the general opinion that a weight of gold of about