Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/272

 The process by which the gold Talent was arrived at was somewhat thus:

The ox-unit of 130-135 grs. is the basis.

Next the fivefold of this was taken, whether from five being the simplest multiple, since it was suggested from the primitive method of counting by the fingers of one hand, or far less likely from a slave being estimated at 5 oxen, somewhat as we find among the Homeric Greeks an ordinary slave-woman estimated at four cows, and in ancient Ireland at three cows. This weight is known as the Assyrian five-shekel standard, and from it Mr Petrie derives the 80-grain standard which he detects as the unit of a certain number of weights found at Naucratis (Naukratis, p. 86). Whilst the Egyptians contented themselves with the 5 ket and 10 ket, or uten, as their highest unit, the Chaldaeans advanced to the fifty-fold (5 × 10), and thus obtained that which probably for a long time formed their highest unit.

What was this Maneh? Is it a Semitic word or is it rather an Aryan, as the present writer has argued elsewhere ? At all events it is interesting to find the appearance of a similar word in the Rig Veda and that too in connection with gold: this has been regarded by some as a loan word from Babylon. But it is equally possible, that it is a "loan word" from India to Babylon. The maneh evidently belongs to a period anterior to the development of the sexagesimal system, for if it had come into use along with or subsequent to that system, we should certainly find 60 instead of 50 shekels in the mina of gold and the mina of silver: hence it cannot in any wise be regarded as a distinctive feature of the Babylonian scientific system, as it plainly existed at the time when the decimal system was still dominant. As the latter was the system which prevailed among the Indians of the Vedic period there was no reason why they should borrow the Chaldaean term. On the contrary there is rather a reason why the Chaldaeans would have borrowed the term from India. Gold did not pass into India from Babylonia, for as we have already