The first voyage undertaken to the ancient El Dorado may have been to search for the region from whence came the gold, somewhat in the fashion that in after-times Pytheas of Massalia sallied forth to investigate the sources of the tin and amber which reached Marseilles overland from Britain and the Baltic. After weighing these considerations we shall be careful to avoid any dogmatic declarations as to the origin of the word mana. One thing however is clear, and that is that the ancient Hindus were employing certain lumps of gold probably of uniform size in Vedic times, as we saw[317]. The Indians of the Vedic times had thus a gold unit of their own (and as we have shown above probably based on the value of a cow) before they as yet knew the use of silver or had as yet reached the sea in their downward advance into the peninsula of Hindustan. Even granting that they borrowed the Manā from Babylonia, it is plain that they had already their own gold unit, for otherwise instead of employing hiranya pinda, a most primitive term meaning only gold-lump, they would certainly have borrowed the term shekel along with the maneh. But the fact of most importance for us at present is that, whether maneh be Semitic or Aryan, in either case it seems to mean not a weight but a measure. It will be remembered that we found the catty or pound of Further Asia was in origin a natural unit of capacity, as was shown by its Cambodian name neal, which simply means a cocoa-nut, and that we found in China the joints of the bamboo of certain sizes serving as their measures of capacity, and both cocoa-nuts and bamboo joints among the Malays of the Indian Isles. This will naturally suggest the question, Is it possible that the maneh had a somewhat similar origin? Was some natural object, such as the gourd, which is at the present moment the ordinary unit of capacity at Zanzibar, taken to serve as a measure of liquids or of corn? It is probable that the Greek cyathus (κύαθος) like its Latin congener cucurbita meant originally some kind of gourd. But there is a certain amount of probability that the Semitic peoples used gourds in primitive times for vessels, not simply from à priori considerations, but from the fact that the most archaic pottery obtained by Mr Petrie from his excavations on the site of the ancient city of Lachish in 1890 show unmistakable signs of being modelled after the shape of a gourd. Although the Chinese never have employed their ching (catty) for the precious metals, yet the Cambodians have advanced to counting silver not only by the catty but also by the picul. Did then the Babylonians make 50 shekels of gold or silver roundly equal to their maneh or measure of capacity? This is of course pure speculation, but it is at least supported by the comparison of what has actually taken place elsewhere; and even from the empire of the Great King himself can we get an insight into the method by which the maneh (and likewise the Talent) may have been brought into the weight system. Herodotus[318] tells us that when the tribute of gold (largely in gold dust) and silver was brought to the King he stored it thus: “he melts it and pours it into earthenware jars, and when he has filled the vessels he strips off the earthenware, and whenever he wants money, he cuts off as much as he needs on each occasion.” We saw above that the Cambodian catty of silver is twice the weight of the catty of rice, the Cambodian catty being simply the cocoanut, the ordinary unit of capacity, which after being filled with rice or silver and then weighed has given two different catties. The Great King no doubt poured his gold into jars of known capacity, and the weight of such a jar when filled with gold was well known. It seems then not unlikely that in this way from either a jar, or from the gourd which preceded the jar, the mina was derived. However the maneh may have been determined, it is fairly certain that the Babylonians fixed upon 50 as a convenient multiple of the gold unit when silver first came into use; as we have seen above it was probably equal if not superior in value to gold and it was naturally weighed by the same unit. But in the course of time as it became more plentiful, and at the same time if likewise the art of weighing began to be employed by merchants in the traffic in the costly spices and balsams of the east, a necessity would be specially felt among traders for a somewhat heavier unit than the original shekel. Possibly then the Aramaean merchants adopted the double shekel (based on the double ox-unit) for the purpose of weighing silver (when that metal had now become much more plentiful than gold), and for trade in precious gums and spices. Such a procedure can be well paralleled by the old English pound of silk, which is simply two pounds Troy weight. Silk was of course of great value, and was accordingly weighed after the same system as the precious metals; but when it became less costly and more abundant the weight unit was simply doubled. We may therefore regard the doubling of the original shekel as an early step towards the development of a commercial standard. It is not difficult to understand how in the course of time a nation of traders like the Phoenicians preferred this double standard even for their gold, and made it perhaps, as we shall shortly see, the basis of their silver standard.
We saw above that there is every reason to believe that when silver first became known to mankind, they esteemed it as highly as gold, if not more so. It would naturally, therefore, be weighed on the same standard as gold. This would continue until, in the course of years, a time came when the relation between gold and silver had become fairly fixed over all Asia Minor. We know that in the beginning of the 5th cent. B.C. gold was to silver as 13:1 (or rather 13·3:1). Herodotus, in the celebrated passage in which he describes the organisation of the Persian empire into satrapies, and details the amount of tribute appointed by Darius for each, tells us that the gold was reckoned at thirteen times the value of silver. Now for ordinary purposes of exchange this relation would be extremely inconvenient, and the more accurate relation of 13·3:1 would be still more so. It became thus desirable to fix some separate standard for silver by which a convenient number, such as 10, of silver ingots would be equal to the gold ingot of the ox-unit standard. Metrologists are wont to speak of the desirability of being able to exchange a round number of talents of silver for a talent of gold. But not even in the palmiest days of the wealthy Orient lands was the ordinary individual so rich that he felt any inconvenience in the way of exchanging talents of gold and silver. The Great King might deal out talents as he pleased, but his subjects were chiefly concerned with the exchange of silver and gold shekels. I have made this remark because it appears to me that many of the misconceptions connected with this whole subject have arisen from scholars concentrating all their attention on the talent, and taking it as their point of departure.
The Babylonians arrived at their silver standard as follows:
1 gold shekel of 130 grs. was worth 1730 grs. of silver (130 × 13·3), since gold was to silver as 13·3:1.
130 grs. gold = 1730 grs. silver.
They divided this amount of silver by 10, and thus:
1 gold shekel of 130 grs. = 10 silver shekels of 173 grs.
As we stated already, Herodotus says that the Babylonian talent was equal to 70 Euboic minas, that is, one-sixth more than the Euboic talent. The latter contained 390,000 grs. Troy, therefore the Babylonian ought to give 455,000 grs. If we multiply our silver shekel by 50 and then by 60, we shall obtain a total amount for the talent of silver of 519,000 grs. Unfortunately several inaccuracies have crept into the text of Herodotus, numerals always being especially liable to corruption in MSS. He seems, however, to have regarded the relation of the Euboic to the Babylonian talent as about that of 5:6, and also to have estimated the current weight of the Persian silver piece at about 162 grs. Troy. But there can be little doubt that the full standard weight of the Babylonian silver shekel was 169 grs. (or, according to Mr Head, 172·9 grs.).
From this it is easy to construct the Babylonian silver system, which was employed in Lydia and in the Persian empire.
| 1 | shekel | = | 169 grs. | |||
| 50 | shekels | = | 1 | mina | = | 7450, |
| 60 | minae | = | 1 talent 447000. | |||