Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/217

 "But the Phoenicians in common with the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Hebrews etc. with whom they dealt were at no time without their own peculiar weights and measures upon which they appear to have grafted the Assyrio-Babylonian principal unit of account or the weight in which it was customary to estimate values. This weight was the 60th part of the manah or mina. "The Babylonian sexagesimal system was foreign to Phoenician habits. While therefore these people had no difficulty in adopting the Assyrio-Babylonian 60th as their own unit of weight or shekel, they did not at the same time adopt the sexagesimal system in its entirety but constituted a new mina for themselves consisting of 50 shekels instead of 60. In estimating the largest weight of all, the Talent, the multiplication by 60 was nevertheless retained. Thus in the Phoenician system as in that of the Greeks 50 shekels (Gk. staters) = 1 Mina, and 60 Minae or 3000 shekels or staters = 1 Talent. "The particular form of shekel which appears to have been received by the Phoenicians and Hebrews from the East was the 60th part of the heavier of the two Assyrio-Babylonian minae above referred to. The 60th of the lighter for some reason which has not been satisfactorily accounted for seems to have been transmitted westwards by a different route, viz. across Asia Minor, and so into the kingdom of Lydia.  "The Lydians.

"'The Lydians,' says E. Curtius (Hist. Gr. 76), 'became on land what the Phoenicians were by sea, the mediators between Hellas and Asia.' It is related that about the time of the Trojan Wars and for some centuries afterwards, the country of the Lydians was in a state of vassalage to the kings of Assyria. But an Assyrian inscription informs us that Asia Minor, west of the Halys, was unknown to the Assyrian kings before the time of Assur-banî-apli, or Assurbanipal (circ.  666), who it is stated received an embassy from Gyges, king of Lydia 'a remote' country, of which Assurbanipal's predecessors had never heard the name. Nevertheless that there had been some