Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/266

 likewise seen how the ancient Irish, after borrowing the Roman ounce, and equating an ounce of silver to the cow, made for their silver a higher unit by taking three ounces, which represented three cows, the ordinary price of a female slave (cumhal).

The Phoenicians employed the double shekel as their unit, but there is evidence to show that the light shekel was the original unit. We have seen that in Egypt, Palestine and Greece, from the remotest time, gold circulated in the form of rings made of a fixed amount of gold, and also that the unit on which they were made was our ox unit, or light shekel (130-5 grains). From the practice of using gold rings in currency as well as for ornament, we may safely conclude that the standard of 130 grains upon which these were probably made was far anterior to the use of the double shekel in Syria and Phoenicia.

The standards which we have learned from the weights found at Nineveh and Khorsabad are now generally known as the light royal talent, and the heavy royal talent, because on specimens of both standards the inscriptions describe them as weights "of the king."

It is evident that as gold and silver had each a separate standard, the "royal" standards were not employed for the precious metals. It is then most probable that they were employed for the weighing of the inferior metals such as copper, which of course played a most important part in the daily life of both Babylonians and Assyrians. We may rest assured that corn was not weighed but continued to be bought and sold by dry measure, as it was with the Hebrews in the days of the Prophets, when the Homer and the Ephah were employed to measure it.

I shall now give a tabular view of the three standards used by the peoples of Mesopotamia and their neighbours, treating the heavy royal talent as merely the double of the light one.

1 Stater = 130 grs. Troy (8·4 gram.). 50 Staters = 1 Mina = 6500 grs. (420·O gram.). 60 Minae  = 1 Talent = 390000 grs.