Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/283

 unit, such as we find in the heavy royal Babylonian system. We may find further analogies between our own system and that of the Babylonians. Whilst at the Mint gold and silver are weighed for coinage by Troy weight, the copper coinage on the other hand is regulated by the lb. Avoirdupois, the ordinary commercial standard. As already remarked, it is almost certain from the method of elimination that copper was the principal article for which the royal Babylonian system was employed, as gold and silver had separate standards of their own, and corn was sold by measure and not by weight.

To sum up then the results of our enquiry into the Assyrio-Babylonian system, we started with the so-called light shekel or ox-unit as the basis of the system; and found that gold and silver were weighed by it and by its fifty-fold, the maneh, which may have been itself a natural measure of capacity, such as the catty used in Eastern Asia, where we know for certain that this weight was originally a measure of capacity obtained from the joints of bamboos or the cocoanut; that in a certain part of the empire a need was felt for a slightly heavier unit for the weighing of silver and precious commodities such as gums and spices, and that accordingly the great trading Aramaic peoples used the two-fold of the ox-unit (260 grains Troy); that at the earliest period copper would not be sold by weight but would be sold by bars or plates of fixed dimensions, as is still the practice with iron and copper among the barbarous peoples of Further Asia and Africa; that with the advance of culture the art of weighing was extended to copper and other articles of small value in proportion to their bulk, and that, as the maneh, or contents of a gourd, and the load or amount that a man could carry on his back, had been most probably in general use as units for common merchandise, the time came when under the all-mastering authority of the Great King a standard based on the ancient ox-unit, but framed on the new scientific sexagesimal system, was established for copper and certain other kinds of merchandise; that in this system 60 shekels made the maneh, and the load (the kikkar or talent) was adjusted to the new system as the sixty-fold of the maneh; and that in the course of time this