Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/275

 *ever he wants money, he cuts off as much as he needs on each occasion." We saw above that the Cambodian catty of silver is twice the weight of the catty of rice, the Cambodian catty being simply the cocoanut, the ordinary unit of capacity, which after being filled with rice or silver and then weighed has given two different catties. The Great King no doubt poured his gold into jars of known capacity, and the weight of such a jar when filled with gold was well known. It seems then not unlikely that in this way from either a jar, or from the gourd which preceded the jar, the mina was derived. However the maneh may have been determined, it is fairly certain that the Babylonians fixed upon 50 as a convenient multiple of the gold unit when silver first came into use; as we have seen above it was probably equal if not superior in value to gold and it was naturally weighed by the same unit. But in the course of time as it became more plentiful, and at the same time if likewise the art of weighing began to be employed by merchants in the traffic in the costly spices and balsams of the east, a necessity would be specially felt among traders for a somewhat heavier unit than the original shekel. Possibly then the Aramaean merchants adopted the double shekel (based on the double ox-unit) for the purpose of weighing silver (when that metal had now become much more plentiful than gold), and for trade in precious gums and spices. Such a procedure can be well paralleled by the old English pound of silk, which is simply two pounds Troy weight. Silk was of course of great value, and was accordingly weighed after the same system as the precious metals; but when it became less costly and more abundant the weight unit was simply doubled. We may therefore regard the doubling of the original shekel as an early step towards the development of a commercial standard. It is not difficult to understand how in the course of time a nation of traders like the Phoenicians preferred this double standard even for their gold, and made it perhaps, as we shall shortly see, the basis of their silver standard.

We saw above that there is every reason to believe that when silver first became known to mankind, they esteemed it as highly as gold, if not more so. It would naturally, there