Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/205

 of the tael. We also found the bar of silver, the common monetary unit at the present moment, equated to the buffalo, the common unit of barter among the Bahnars, and finally we had a distinct tradition that not so long ago the wild tribesmen who win the gold dust from the sands of their native brooks did not as yet even weigh the metal by means of the grains of maize which are now employed, but that they measured off a small rod of gold an inch long as the equivalent of a buffalo.

From all these facts it seems easy to trace the history of the development of weight standards in Further Asia; the first stage in trafficking in gold seems to be one purely by measure, then comes that of weighing by means of grains of corn, the weight in gold of one or more grains of corn being taken in the ordinary way of barter like other articles in the common scale of exchange. A multiple of the higher unit the bat was formed, possibly based on the slave as the multiple of the buffalo. This multiple is threefold of the bat, in that respect offering a strange analogy to the gold talent of Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Macedonia, which is the threefold of the Homeric ox-unit, and which, as I have conjectured, may have represented the value of a slave, as we certainly know as a fact that the highest unit in the Irish system, the cumhal, which represented the value of three cows or three ounces of silver, was neither more nor less than an ancilla (or ordinary slave-woman): the tenfold of this tael was the highest unit employed for either gold or silver by the most advanced peoples in this region, and is very well known as the nên or bar. All other goods were long appraised by measurement, the lowest unit of capacity being the cocoa-nut or the joint of the bamboo, the former known certainly to the Cambodians, the latter to the Chinese, whilst both are equally familiar to the Malays. The weight of the contents of the bamboo or cocoa-nut was presently taken, the standard employed being the tael, or highest unit yet employed for the precious metals. The weight of the contents would depend on the nature of the substance or liquid employed, for instance rice or some other kind of grain, or water. Thus the Chinese equate their catty to 16 taels; no doubt too