Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/235

 maritime people trading round the coasts of Greece. There was undoubtedly intercourse between Greece and Egypt, but that intercourse was through the medium of the shipmen of Tyre. Why should then the Aeginetans adopt a standard from abroad which differed from that of the Phoenicians with whom they were in constant commercial relations? Again, if there is any connection between the importation of weight standards and the commencement of coinage, it may be urged that whilst it was from the Phoenicians the Aeginetans learned the art which had been originated in Asia Minor, or at all events from the Greeks of the coast of Asia Minor who coined electrum money on the Phoenician standard, we ought naturally to find the Greeks of Aegina using this standard for their earliest coinage rather than a standard borrowed from Egypt, which most certainly was very backward in developing the art of coining, seeing that it was not until after the conquest of that country by Alexander the Great ( 330) that money was there struck for the first time.

Passing by for the moment Mr Head's view, let us next deal with that of Dr Hultsch. This theory has the great merit of granting that the Greeks were capable of evolving a silver standard for themselves from a knowledge of the relative value of gold and silver, whilst the other theories assume that they borrowed blindly ready-made standards, which they for some unknown reason either raised according to Brandis, or degraded according to Head. But Dr Hultsch is met by two crucial difficulties. (1) Why should the Aeginetans have taken six light Babylonian shekels of gold and arbitrarily made them the basis of their new silver standard? (2) But the fatal objection is that whereas Hultsch's theory depends on gold being to silver in the same relation (13·3:1) in Greece Proper as it was in Asia Minor, as a matter of fact it can be proved that the precious metals there stood in a very different relation to each other. In the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1887, I gave some reasons for believing that in early times gold was to silver in Greece in the relation of 15:1. For whilst gold was plentiful in Asia,