Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/274

 *ploying hiranya pinda, a most primitive term meaning only gold-lump, they would certainly have borrowed the term shekel along with the maneh. But the fact of most importance for us at present is that, whether maneh be Semitic or Aryan, in either case it seems to mean not a weight but a measure. It will be remembered that we found the catty or pound of Further Asia was in origin a natural unit of capacity, as was shown by its Cambodian name neal, which simply means a cocoa-nut, and that we found in China the joints of the bamboo of certain sizes serving as their measures of capacity, and both cocoa-nuts and bamboo joints among the Malays of the Indian Isles. This will naturally suggest the question, Is it possible that the maneh had a somewhat similar origin? Was some natural object, such as the gourd, which is at the present moment the ordinary unit of capacity at Zanzibar, taken to serve as a measure of liquids or of corn? It is probable that the Greek cyathus ([Greek: kyathos]) like its Latin congener cucurbita meant originally some kind of gourd. But there is a certain amount of probability that the Semitic peoples used gourds in primitive times for vessels, not simply from à priori considerations, but from the fact that the most archaic pottery obtained by Mr Petrie from his excavations on the site of the ancient city of Lachish in 1890 show unmistakable signs of being modelled after the shape of a gourd. Although the Chinese never have employed their ching (catty) for the precious metals, yet the Cambodians have advanced to counting silver not only by the catty but also by the picul. Did then the Babylonians make 50 shekels of gold or silver roundly equal to their maneh or measure of capacity? This is of course pure speculation, but it is at least supported by the comparison of what has actually taken place elsewhere; and even from the empire of the Great King himself can we get an insight into the method by which the maneh (and likewise the Talent) may have been brought into the weight system. Herodotus tells us that when the tribute of gold (largely in gold dust) and silver was brought to the King he stored it thus: "he melts it and pours it into earthenware jars, and when he has filled the vessels he strips off the earthenware, and when-*