Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/139

Rh had the reputation of first discovering how to harden iron into steel. It was from them, at all events, that the Greeks acquired the art.

Silver and copper appear, from the evidence of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, to have been the metals most in request, though gold and iron also figure among the objects which the Hittites offered in tribute. The gold and copper were moulded into cups and images of animals, and the copper was changed into bronze by being mixed with tin. From whence the tin was procured we have yet to learn.

Silver and iron were alike used as a medium of exchange. The Assyrian king received from Carchemish 250 talents of iron; and the excavations of Dr. Schliemann among the ruins of Troy have afforded evidence that silver also was employed by the Hittites in place of money, and that its use for this purpose was communicated by them to the most distant nations of Western Asia Minor.

In the so-called 'treasure of Priam,' disinterred among the calcined ruins of Hissarlik or Troy, are six blade-like ingots of silver, about seven or eight inches in length and two in breadth. Mr. Barclay Head has pointed out that each of these ingots weighs the third part of a Babylonian maneh or mina, and further that this particular maneh of 8656 grains Troy, was once employed throughout Asia Minor for weighing bullion silver. It differed from the standard of weight and value used in Phœnicia, Assyria, and Asia Minor itself in the later Greek age. But it corresponded with 'the maneh of Carchemish' mentioned in the Assyrian contract tablets, which continued to hold its own even after the conquest of Carchemish by Sargon. The maneh of