Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/244

 influence so powerfully the Ionic cities of the Asiatic seaboard, with which their commerce was so largely connected?

From these considerations it follows that before the Greeks came into contact with either Phoenicians or Lydians they had a weight standard of their own, the Talanton of the Homeric Poems, based on the cow, which was as yet only employed for the weighing of gold.

This standard we have found to be identical with one of the two chief standards employed in historical times for silver, and which from first to last was the only standard employed for gold in all parts of Hellas Proper.

As we have seen that gold was to silver in that region as 15:1, there was not much difficulty in regarding fifteen weights or staters of silver as equivalent to one of gold of like weight. Hence there was not the same need in Greece to devise a separate silver standard as there was in Asia, where the relation of the precious metals stood as 13·3 : 1, a fact which made simple exchange very difficult. On the other hand we have seen that for the Aeginetans and Greeks, who used the so-called Aeginetic standard, the decimal system, the simplest and most primitive method of reckoning, had a powerful attraction.

Primitive peoples perform all their calculations by means of counters, using for such purposes their fingers and toes or seeds or pebbles.

Nature herself has supplied man with the simplest and most convenient of counters in his ten fingers. Hence naturally arises a preference amongst primitive peoples for counting by tens, and this method, although it has at times been supplanted partially (seldom altogether) by the duodecimal and sexagesimal systems, which are superior by possessing a greater number of submultiples than the decimal (e.g. 12 = 6 × 2, 4 × 3, whilst 10 = 5 × 2 only), was adhered to by the Egyptians all through their history down to the latest Pharaohs. It may then perhaps be argued that it was through Egyptian influence with Greece that a large part of Greece adopted for their silver a standard based on the decimal system, especially as certain traces of Egyptian influence in very early times have been discovered of late. But as I have already pointed out above