Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/199

 *nominations such as the dirhem ([Greek: drachmê]) and dinar (denarius, [Greek: dênarion], from the Greeks and Romans, and as their standard weight the mithkal is nothing more than the sextula or 1/6 of the Roman ounce, employed in the eastern Empire under the name of exagion ([Greek: exagion], whence comes the saggio of Marco Polo), so too their wheat-corns and barley-corns were not of their own devising, but likewise adventitious. After what we have seen above (p. 166) to be the practice of primitive people in the selling of gold, a traffic in which the Arabs had been engaged for many ages, it would seem hardly necessary to reply to such an argument, but as a more complete answer can be given in the course of the last portion of this enquiry, we shall deal with it in that place.

We now come to the Assyrians themselves, from the discovery of whose weights in the shape of lions and ducks, the whole modern theory of a scientific origin for all the weight standards of the Greeks as well as Asiatics and Egyptians has had its origin. But even within this sacred precinct of à priori metrology the irrepressible grain of corn springs up vigorously, although almost choked by the abundant crop of tares which have been sown around it. If we find that a Semitic people, who were the ancients of the earth before Pelops passed from Asia into Greece, or Romulus had founded his Asylum, employed the wheat grain as their lowest weight unit, we may then well argue that ages before the birth of the Prophet and the Arab conquest of Egypt and Syria, the Semitic folks employed grains of corn to form their lowest weight unit.

M. Aurès, a well-known Assyrian metrologist, has recently set forth the Assyrian system in its latest and most advanced stage. Following the veteran Assyriologist, M. Oppert, he finds that the Assyrians used a denomination lower than the obol. In the Museum of the Louvre there is a small Assyrian weight of the "duck" kind, which bears on its base the Assyrian character of 22 grains 1/2. The ideogram translated grain is evidently meant to represent some kind of corn with a rounded end. The weight of this object is ·95 gram (14-6/7 grains