“This transitional stage in the development of commerce cannot be more accurately described than in the words of Aristotle, ‘As the benefits of commerce were more widely extended by importing commodities of which there was a deficiency, and exporting those of which there was an excess, the use of a currency was an indispensable device. As the necessaries of Nature were not all easily portable, people agreed for purposes of barter mutually to give and receive some article which, while it was itself a commodity, was practically easy to handle in the business of life; some such article as iron or silver, which was at first defined simply by size and weight, although finally they went further and set a stamp upon every coin to relieve them from the trouble of weighing it, as the stamp impressed upon the coin was an indication of quantity.’ (Polit. I. 6. 14-16, Trans. Welldon.)
“In Italy and Sicily copper or bronze in very early times took the place of cattle as a generally recognized measure of value, and in Peloponnesus the Spartans are said to have retained the use of iron as a standard of value long after the other Greeks had advanced beyond this point of commercial civilization.
“In the East, on the other hand, from the earliest times gold and silver appear to have been used for the settlement of the transactions of daily life, either metal having its value more or less accurately defined in relation to the other. Thus Abraham is said to have been ‘very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold’ (Gen. xiii. 2, xxiv. 35), and in the account of his purchase of the cave of Machpelah (Gen. xxiii. 16), it is stated that ‘Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current with the merchants.’
“As there are no auriferous rocks or streams in Chaldaea, we must infer that the old Chaldaean traders must have imported their gold from India by way of the Persian Gulf, in the ships of Ur frequently mentioned in cuneiform inscriptions.
“But though gold and silver were from the earliest times used as measures of value in the East, not a single piece of coined money has come down to us of these remote ages, nor is there any mention of coined money in the Old Testament before Persian times. The gold and silver ‘current with the merchant’ were always weighed in the balance; thus we read that David gave to Ornan for his threshing-floor [including oxen and threshing instruments] 600 shekels of gold by weight (1 Chron. xxi. 25).
“It is nevertheless probable that the balance was not called into operation for every small transaction, but that little bars of silver and of gold of fixed weight, but without any official mark (and therefore not coins) were often counted out by tale, larger amounts being always weighed. Such small bars or wedges of gold and silver served the purposes of a currency, and were regulated by the weight of the shekel or the mina.
“This leads us briefly to examine the standards of weight used for the precious metals in the East before the invention of money.
“The metric systems of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.
“The evidence afforded by ancient writers on the subject of weights and coinage is in great part untrustworthy, and would often be unintelligible were it not for the light which has been shed upon it by the gold and silver coins, and bronze, leaden and stone weights which have been fortunately preserved down to our own times. It will be safer, therefore, to confine ourselves to the direct evidence afforded by the monuments.
“Egypt, the oldest civilized country of the ancient world, first claims our attention, but as the weight system which prevailed in the Nile valley does not appear to have exercised any traceable influence upon the early coinage of the Greeks, the metrology of Egypt need not detain us long....