Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/304

 Sanctuary. No doubt the mina for gold always contained 100 light or 50 heavy shekels, and when their own peculiar shekel of 220 grs. came into vogue for silver, 50 such shekels made a mina. Finally, there can be little doubt that 60 minas invariably went to the talent.

In the case of commercial weights, it is most probable that 60 heavy shekels made a mina: this is rendered almost perfectly certain by the Lion weights with Phoenician as well as cuneiform inscriptions found at Nineveh, 60 heavy minas forming a heavy talent.

It is worth while before going further to enquire whether we can gain any light from the systems of weight employed by the famous daughter-cities of Phoenicia, such as Gades and Carthage. A weight bearing in Punic characters the name of the Agoranomos and the numeral 100 has been found at Jol (Julia Caesarea) in North Africa, but unfortunately it has suffered so much by corrosion from water and the loss of its handle that it is impossible to make any tolerable approximation to its original weight. Hultsch conjectures with some probability that, making allowance for its loss, it represents 100 drachms, and deduces from this that the Carthaginians treated the drachm as their shekel, but for this latter hypothesis there seems no sufficient evidence. If this supposition were true, the weight would represent a half-mina of the Phoenician silver standard. But there is one thing which this weight does prove, and that is that, whether it be a mina or half-mina, it is the drachm or shekel, which was evidently regarded as the unit of the system, not the mina. Thus once more we get a confirmation of our general thesis that the mina and talent are the multiples, and that it is the shekel or stater which is the basis. Nor does the coinage of Carthage furnish us with all the information that could be desired, for it was only after 410 that that great "mart of merchants" began to strike coins, and even then it was only in her Sicilian pos-*