“The Chaldaeans and Babylonians, as is well known, excelled especially in the cognate sciences of arithmetic and astronomy. On the broad and monotonous plains of Lower Mesopotamia, says Professor Rawlinson, where the earth has little to suggest thought or please by variety the ‘variegated heaven,’ ever changing with the times and the seasons, would early attract attention, while the clear sky, dry atmosphere, and level horizon, would afford facilities for observations so soon as the idea of them suggested itself to the minds of the inhabitants. The records of these astronomical observations were inscribed in cuneiform character on soft clay tablets, afterwards baked hard and preserved in the royal or public libraries in the chief cities of Babylonia. Large numbers of these tablets are now in the British Museum. When Alexander the Great took Babylon, it is recorded that there were found and sent to Aristotle a series of astronomical observations extending back as far as the year B.C. 2234. Recent investigations into the nature of these records render it probable that upon them rests the entire structure of the metric system of the Babylonians. The day and night were divided by the Babylonians into 24 hours, each of 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds—a method of measuring time which has never been superseded, and which we have inherited from Babylon, together with the first principles of the science of astronomy. The Babylonian measures of capacity and their system of weights were based, it is thought, upon one and the same unit as their measures of time and space, and as they are believed to have determined the length of an hour of equinoctial time by means of the dropping of water, so too it is conceivable that they may have fixed the weight of their talents, their mina, and their shekel, as well as the size of their measures of capacity, by weighing or measuring the amounts of water, which had passed from one vessel into another during a given space of time. Thus, just as an hour consisted of 60 minutes and the minute of 60 seconds, so the talent contained 60 minae, and the mina 60 shekels. The division by sixties or sexagesimal system, is quite as characteristic of the Babylonian arithmetic and system of weights and measures, as the decimal system is of the Egyptian and the modern French. And indeed it possesses one great advantage over the decimal system, inasmuch as the number 60, upon which it is based, is more divisible than 10.
“About 1300 years before our era the Assyrian empire came to surpass in importance that of the Babylonians, but the learning and science of Chaldaea were not lost, but rather transmitted through Nineveh by means of the Assyrian conquests and commerce to the north and west as far as the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Let us now turn to the actual monuments. Some thirty years ago Mr Layard discovered and brought home from the ruins of ancient Nineveh a number of bronze lions of various sizes which may now be seen in the British Museum. With them were also a number of stone objects in the form of ducks[252].”
From this double series of weights Mr Head infers that there were two distinct minae simultaneously in use during the long period of time which elapsed between about B.C. 2000, and B.C. 625. “The heavier of these two minae appears to have been just the double of the lighter. Brandis is probably not far from the mark in fixing the weight of the heavy mina at 1010 grammes, and that of the light at 505 grammes.
“It has been suggested that the lighter of these two minae may have been peculiar to the Babylonian, and the heavier to the Assyrian empire; but this cannot be proved. But nevertheless it would seem that the use of the heavy mina was more extended in Syria than that of the lighter, if we may judge from the fact that most of the weights belonging to the system of the heavy mina have in addition to the cuneiform inscription an Aramaic one.
“The purpose which this Aramaic inscription served must clearly have been to render the weight acceptable to the Syrian and Phoenician merchants who traded backwards and forwards between Assyria and Mesopotamia on the one hand, and the Phoenician emporia on the other.
“The Phoenician traders.
“The Phoenician commerce was chiefly a carrying trade. The richly embroidered stuffs of Babylonia and other products of the East were brought down to the coasts, and then carefully packed in chests of cedarwood in the markets of Tyre and Sidon, whence they were shipped by the enterprising Phoenician mariners to Cyprus, to the coasts of the Aegean, or even to the extreme West.
“Hence the Phoenician city of Tyre was called by Ezekiel (xxvii.) ‘a merchant of the people for many isles.’