Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/273

 seen there are no auriferous strata in Mesopotamia, but it passed from the rich surface deposit of the valley of the Oxus and Central Asia into Chaldaea. Now if the same term intimately associated with the same commodity is found among two different peoples, and it is known as a matter of certainty that one of these countries supplies the other with this particular article, there is a considerable probability that the peculiar term connected with the commodity has passed along with it from the source of its production into the country which imports it.

We saw above that there was no native gold in Chaldaea and therefore it must have been imported by those Chaldaean merchantmen from India by way of the Persian Gulf. But was there no gold in Chaldaea until the shipmen of Ur were able to construct vessels capable of a voyage, even albeit only a coasting voyage, to the mouths of the Indus? Working in metals must have been far advanced when such ships were built. That gold came from India we can have little doubt. But it probably came overland for ages before anything in the form of a ship larger than a 'dug-out' had ever floated on the Indian Seas.

The first voyage undertaken to the ancient El Dorado may have been to search for the region from whence came the gold, somewhat in the fashion that in after-times Pytheas of Massalia sallied forth to investigate the sources of the tin and amber which reached Marseilles overland from Britain and the Baltic. After weighing these considerations we shall be careful to avoid any dogmatic declarations as to the origin of the word mana. One thing however is clear, and that is that the ancient Hindus were employing certain lumps of gold probably of uniform size in Vedic times, as we saw. The Indians of the Vedic times had thus a gold unit of their own (and as we have shown above probably based on the value of a cow) before they as yet knew the use of silver or had as yet reached the sea in their downward advance into the peninsula of Hindustan. Even granting that they borrowed the Manā from Babylonia, it is plain that they had already their own gold unit, for otherwise instead of em-*