Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/65

 horses, beads, skins or blankets. Presently male captives are found useful both to tend flocks and, as in the East and in the modern Soudan, to guard the harem. With the discovery of gold, ornaments made at first out of the rough nuggets supersede other ornaments, and presently either such ornaments or portions of gold in plates or lumps are added to the list of media, and the same follows with the discovery of silver. Such ornaments or pieces of gold and silver are estimated in terms of cattle, and the standard unit of the bars or ingots naturally is adjusted to the unit by which it is appraised. Thus we found the Homeric talent, the silver bar of Annam, the Irish unga all equated to the cow, and the Welsh libra, Anglo-Saxon libra, similarly equated to the slave. With the discovery of the art of weaving, cloths of a definite size everywhere become a medium, as the silk cloth of ancient China, the woollen cloths of the old Norsemen, the toukkiyeh of the Soudan, and the blanket of North America. This fact once more recalls Homer and makes us believe that the robes and blankets and coverlets which Priam brought along with the talents of gold to be the ransom of Hector's body all had a definite place in the Homeric monetary system.

We have seen the Siamese piece of twisted silver wire passing into a coin of European style, and we shall find that the Chinese bronze knife has finally ended by becoming a cash, just as we have already found the Homeric talent of gold appearing, in weight at least, as the gold stater of historical times. Thus in every point the analogy between what we find in the Homeric Poems and in modern barbarous communities seems complete. We may therefore with some confidence assume that we are at liberty to fill up the gaps in the strata of Greek monetary history which lie between Homer and the beginning of coined money on the analogy of the corresponding strata in other regions. This assumption, resting on a broad basis of induction and confirmed, as we shall see, by a good deal of evidence special to Greece and Italy, will be found to explain the origin, not only of weight standards in those countries, but