Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/280

 Java, whilst gold and silver are weighed by units of small size, copper is sold by the picul.

It seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that the origin of the talent has been analogous to that of the picul. There is certainly nothing in either the Hebrew kikkar or the Greek talanton to imply in the slightest degree that they represented a numerical multiple of the mina. The Greek word means simply a weight, whilst the Hebrew seems to mean nothing more than a round mass or cake of anything, whether applied to a tract of country, as the region round the Jordan (as in Nehemiah vii. 28), or a loaf of bread (Exodus xxix. 23; 1 Samuel ii. 36). For as the talent was only introduced into the Hebrew system at a late period the term was probably applied to a cake or pig of copper or iron the weight of the ordinary load. That there was a direct connection between the kikkar and a man's load seems implied by the fact that Naaman "bound two talents of silver in two bags, with two changes of garments, and laid them upon two of his servants; and they bare them before him" (2 Kings v. 23). As we find Naaman asking Elisha for "two mules' burden of earth" (v. 17) it is at least certain that the Semites regularly estimated bulky weights by some kind of load. We saw above that in Assyrian the same ideogram stands for tribute and talent. If a load of corn was the regular unit for tribute, the use of a single ideogram may be explained. In the case of talanton we have no difficulty in directly regarding it as a load, whilst with kikkar it is not difficult to see how easy it was for the meaning of a load of a certain weight to spring from the earlier meaning of the word. Its use as a loaf is interesting in connection with the fact noted on p. 159 that in Annam the largest unit in use for gold and silver is called a loaf.

When under a strong central government a metric system more or less scientific was introduced at Babylon, it was natural that an accurate adjustment of the old empirical unit of merchandise, the load, to the mina and shekel should be carefully carried out, just as in China the Mathematical Board have fixed the picul of commerce as the hundred fold of the ching (catty), giving it a value equal to 133-1/3 lbs. avoirdupois.