Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/67

 more northern clime cattle formed the principal wealth of their forefathers.

In the Soudan, as we have seen to this day, slaves and oxen are the chief kinds of property. Crossing back to Europe we find the Italian tribes represented in the earliest records as a cattle-keeping people. The story of their invasion of Italy took the form of their driving before them a steer and following obediently to whatever new home it might lead them.

The same holds of the more northern peoples. When the Gauls entered the plains of Northern Italy they drove before them vast herds of cattle. Caesar found the Britons keeping large numbers of cattle, and especially those in the interior of the island subsisting almost entirely on their produce. Strabo writing about 1, mentions hides as among the articles exported from Britain to the Continent.

The linguistic argument fully supports the literary evidence. All the Aryan or Indo-European peoples possess a common name for the cow. The Sanskrit gaus, Greek [Greek: bous], Lat. bos, Irish bo, German kuh, Eng. cow, taken together indicate that before the dispersion of the various stocks (whether the original home of the Aryans was in Northern Europe, as Latham first suggested, or in the Hindu Kush, as Prof. Max Müller maintains) they all possessed the cow. This is further supported by the name for the bull which is found amongst various stocks, the Greek [Greek: tauros], Lat. taurus, Irish tarb, and the name of the ox, which corresponds to the Sanskrit uksha, and finally the name of steer. Here then we have undoubted evidence of the universal possession of cattle by the Aryans at a very early period.

Archaeology lends its support likewise. We have already found in the case of the Greeks the cow used as a unit of currency side by side with gold. This leads us to the question of the precious metals, which in course of time have come to be almost the sole medium of exchange. In the case of the Greeks we saw reason to believe that the barter-unit was older than