The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards

by William Ridgeway

PART II.

CHAPTER X.
The Systems of Egypt, Babylon, and Palestine.

We are now in a position to approach the last stage in our task, that which deals with the growth and development of various weight-standards, all of which start from a common unit. Of necessity Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Italy will claim a chief share of our attention. The question now is, Shall we deal with these regions according to the priority of their civilization, that is, in the order in which I have just named them, or shall we rather adhere to the principle which has hitherto guided us, of working back from that which is better known to that which is less known?

On the whole the former is perhaps the better for our present purpose. As we believe that we have discovered by the inductive method the common unit which lies at the base of all these systems, there is no longer the same necessity for always starting with that which is the less ancient. Besides, if we were nominally to pursue this course, it by no means follows that we would be starting from that which is the best known. Prima facie we ought to start with the Roman system, the tradition of which has remained unbroken down to our own days. We could work back through the system of the Middle Ages to the time of Constantine the Great, from Constantine to the early Empire, and from the Empire to the Republic. Moreover no weight-unit is more accurately known than the Roman pound. But the early history of Rome is so obscure that we have absolutely no records of a time, when Greece had already a literature of a venerable antiquity. Rome has no literary remains and even not more than a very few meagre inscriptions dating from before the first Punic War (263-241 B.C.), the very time when Hellas was already far advanced in the autumn of her life. Then Italy had borrowed so much from Hellas that the enquirer must be cautious as to how far he may be dealing with material of true Italian or merely adventitious origin. As we are concerned rather with the origin than with the later developments of weight-systems, it is plain that for dealing with our principal objects the Italian systems present us with no special aid. The late period (268 B.C.) at which the Romans struck silver coins places us at a still further disadvantage if we start with their system. Greece on the other hand presents us not only with abundant literary records of great antiquity, some of them descending from an age which knew not the uses of coined money, but also with thousands of inscriptions cut in marble or bronze, many of which contain data of great value for dealing with the history of currency and weight, and finally presents us with vast series of coins from which we can learn empirically the coin standards employed in various times and places. But it is the very wealth of material that is in some degree here our difficulty. The special feature of Greek national life was its numerous autonomous states. There was no central authority with a mint which issued coins for a whole empire as was virtually the case in the great Persian kingdom, and at a later period in the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great. In the palmy days of Hellas each petty state issued its own coinage, following in its silver and copper mintages whatever standard or module it pleased.

To commence our constructive part with a country where we are confronted with such an array of separate coinages and of diverse standards would be unwise if it were possible to start from some region where there was a single central authority, and consequently less diversity of standards. We are thus led to choose either Egypt or Babylonia as our starting point. The former presents to us a system less developed and more simple than the latter. In fact we are tolerably well justified, in view of recent discussion, in regarding all that is more complex in the system of Egypt as borrowed from Babylonia. Yet it must not be supposed that we escape all difficulties in thus starting with Egypt. If in Hellas we found ourselves embarrassed by the wealth of coinages, in Egypt on the other hand we have no native coinage to guide us, for it was only after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander that under the Greek dynasty founded by Ptolemy Lagos the essentially Greek art of coining was introduced into Egypt. We depend therefore for our knowledge of Egyptian standards upon the actual weighings of weight-pieces and such information as can be gleaned from the ancient Egyptian documents. The same holds good likewise on the whole for the Assyrian system, where however the actual weight-pieces and statements derived from cuneiform inscriptions can in some degree be supported by collateral evidence. At the same time we must be careful not to assign as much importance to the literary evidence supplied to us by Egyptian hieroglyphic or Assyrian cuneiform as we do to the records of Greece or Rome. The keys to the former have only been obtained within the present century, and many of the translations of such documents given us by that brilliant band of savants who have opened to us the portals of a Past far exceeding in antiquity the most remote epoch of which the literatures of Greece and Rome contain even any tradition, must at the best in many cases be considered only as tentative.

Furthermore although the knowledge gained from actually existing weights, which have been gleaned from the ruins of Nineveh, Khorsabad, or Naucratis, may be regarded as positive and more or less exact, we are met by the difficulty that in the case of Egypt and Assyria, where there was no coined money, we have no means of deciding what class of weight was used for certain kinds of commodities. In Greece and in the countries which formed the Persian empire we can be sure at all events of the standards which were employed in the weighing of gold and silver: the absence of this test is a serious hindrance in the study of Egyptian and Assyrian metrology. It is easy to illustrate by a supposed example the element of uncertainty introduced. Let us suppose that in ages to come the ruins of some English ironmonger’s shop were excavated, and a series of weights was found therein, a set of Avoirdupois weights ranging from a one-hundredweight to half an ounce; a set of Troy weights ranging from one pound to half a grain, and one of Apothecaries’ weights consisting of ounces, drachms, scruples, and grains. Suppose likewise that some ardent metrologist of that age, in addition to this splendid find, should be able to add to his material from elsewhere one or two sovereign and half-sovereign weights, a guinea, half-guinea, quarter-guinea, and seven-shilling-piece weight, perhaps even a noble, or a half-noble weight, and then without consulting literary sources, or previously studying the standards on which the English coinage had been struck at different periods, proceeded to reconstruct the metrological system of England. It is needless to say that his conclusions would be indeed widely aberrant from the truth.

Having thus sketched however roughly some of the difficulties which beset our path, and after warning the reader that in metrology if anywhere the maxim of the old Sicilian poet is to be observed,

Sober keep, to doubt inclined be;

Hinges these are of the mind[292],

I shall now proceed to set forth the method in which I conceive the various systems gradually rose and expanded. Let us bear in mind the fact already proved that gold was the first of all commodities to be weighed, and that consequently the standards employed for weighing that metal are the most archaic.