From the double gold shekel was formed another silver standard known as the Phoenician.
Gold being to silver as 13:1,
| 1 double shekel of 260 grs. | = | 3380 grs. silver, |
| 3380 grs. silver | = | 15 shekels of 225·3 grs. |
As this silver standard is found in the same area as the double gold shekel, I have thought it best to follow the usual derivation, but at the same time it is worth pointing out that it may have been gained directly from the light shekel.
The light shekel (which in the form of coined money appears either as the gold of Croesus, or the Daric), in the case of the Babylonian system was made equal to ten silver didrachms, or 20 drachms known under the name of Sigli; it likewise is equal in value to 15 Phoenician didrachms of 112·6 grs. Thus, whilst in one region they obtained a silver unit, ten of which would be an equivalent to the gold unit, in another they formed a silver unit, 15 of which would be equivalent to the same gold unit of 130 grs. In each case a number convenient for purposes of exchange was substituted for the extremely unmanageable number 13 (or still more intractable 13·3) of the older system, according to which silver was made into ingots of the same size as those of gold.
These now are the systems on which depended all traffic and currency of the precious metals throughout Western Asia for many centuries. I have been compelled in the statement of the two silver systems to anticipate one step in the growth of the fully developed weight system by speaking of the Talent. We have seen that the mina of silver, like that of gold, contains only 50 shekels, thus evidently having likewise been developed before the full elaboration of the Chaldaean system of numeration, or at least before the application of that system to their metric standards. But when we come to deal with the talent we find that in every case alike, whether it be the gold, silver, or royal talent of commerce, the talent invariably consists of sixty minae. From this we may with safety infer that it was at a period posterior to the invention of the sexagesimal method that the Talent was added to the gold and silver systems. When we turn to the royal system (both light and heavy), we find that the mina consists of sixty shekels, just as the talent consists of 60 minae, and consequently we are constrained to believe that this royal system was fixed at a date long after the growth of the gold and silver minae, and when the sexagesimal system had now complete sway. We have already seen good reason for considering the royal talent to be essentially a mercantile unit. It certainly was not used for gold or silver. Corn was not sold by weight, and so in all probability it was meant for copper, iron, lead, and merchandise of value. We have learned from our studies in the metal trade of primitive peoples that copper and iron are not weighed but are sold by measurement, being wrought into bars or plates of a well defined size. It is only when communities are well advanced in culture that they begin to employ the scales for the buying and selling of the common metals. We argued above that the double shekel system arose from a desire amongst a nation of traders like the Phoenicians for a heavier standard, more serviceable for such goods as were less valuable than gold. It was probably the same desire which found its complete realization in the royal system. Whilst gold and silver had only the mina as their highest unit, there was a new system developed scientifically from the ancient shekel or ox-unit. The sixty-fold of this unit was taken to form a mina considerably heavier than the old gold mina, and now a new higher unit, the sixty-fold of the mina, was introduced. This we know under its Greek name of talent, but it was called kikkar in the Semitic languages. Now are we to suppose that this kikkar or talent was purely and simply nothing more than a higher unit formed by taking a convenient multiple of the lower unit, just as in the French metric system the kilogram is 1000 times the gramme; or was it rather some ancient natural unit, originally formed empirically, and at a later epoch, when science had advanced, fitted into the system of commercial weight by being made exactly the sixty-fold of the mina? Comparison with other systems in various lands will incline us to the latter alternative. If we enquire for a moment in what manner the highest unit of weight for merchandise is fixed among barbarous and semi-civilized nationalities, we shall find that the load, that is, the amount that a man of average size and strength can carry, is the universal unit. Readers of the various recent books of African travel frequently meet in their dreary and monotonous pages allusions to so many loads for which porters have to be supplied. The amount of the load seems to vary in different parts. Thus amongst the Madi or Moru tribe of Central Africa, a pure negro race, according to that admirable observer Mr Felkin, the load is about 50 lbs. in weight, whilst according to Major Barttelot, the load carried by the Zanzibaris on the Emin Pacha Relief expedition was 65 lbs. (besides the man’s own rations for several days). We have already had occasion to refer to the picul of Eastern Asia, which we found was simply the Malay word for a load; and we also found that the load varied in different places. Finally, we found that the Chinese had introduced the picul into their system of commercial weight, fixing it at 100 chings (catties), but at the same time excluded it from their silver and gold system, where the tael (ounce) has remained always the highest unit. Yet in Cambodia we find that the further step has been made, and that the commercial system of the catty and picul has been called into service for the weighing of silver. In Java, whilst gold and silver are weighed by units of small size, copper is sold by the picul.
It seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that the origin of the talent has been analogous to that of the picul. There is certainly nothing in either the Hebrew kikkar or the Greek talanton to imply in the slightest degree that they represented a numerical multiple of the mina. The Greek word means simply a weight, whilst the Hebrew seems to mean nothing more than a round mass or cake of anything, whether applied to a tract of country, as the region round the Jordan (as in Nehemiah vii. 28), or a loaf of bread (Exodus xxix. 23; 1 Samuel ii. 36). For as the talent was only introduced into the Hebrew system at a late period the term was probably applied to a cake or pig of copper or iron the weight of the ordinary load. That there was a direct connection between the kikkar and a man’s load seems implied by the fact that Naaman “bound two talents of silver in two bags, with two changes of garments, and laid them upon two of his servants; and they bare them before him” (2 Kings v. 23). As we find Naaman asking Elisha for “two mules’ burden of earth” (v. 17) it is at least certain that the Semites regularly estimated bulky weights by some kind of load. We saw above that in Assyrian the same ideogram stands for tribute and talent. If a load of corn was the regular unit for tribute, the use of a single ideogram may be explained. In the case of talanton we have no difficulty in directly regarding it as a load, whilst with kikkar it is not difficult to see how easy it was for the meaning of a load of a certain weight to spring from the earlier meaning of the word. Its use as a loaf is interesting in connection with the fact noted on p. 159 that in Annam the largest unit in use for gold and silver is called a loaf.
When under a strong central government a metric system more or less scientific was introduced at Babylon, it was natural that an accurate adjustment of the old empirical unit of merchandise, the load, to the mina and shekel should be carefully carried out, just as in China the Mathematical Board have fixed the picul of commerce as the hundred fold of the ching (catty), giving it a value equal to 133⅓ lbs. avoirdupois. Such scientific adjustments take place in all countries with the advance of civilization and commerce, and above all under the influence of a strong central government. Let us reflect how long it has taken for the English Statute Acre to conquer the local ancient acres in use in various parts of the United Kingdom, such as the Irish, the Scotch or the Winchester acre. In like fashion, although the standards of weight and capacity were regulated by Act of Parliament in 1824, local usage still held on, and units of weight unknown to the Statute still survive in the usage of provincial places. Now it is not unreasonable to suppose that the name royal or king’s weight was given to the Babylonian commercial system, which was constructed on purely sexagesimal lines, because it was enforced by royal proclamation and power throughout the whole of the empire, and that in like manner the royal cubit mentioned by Herodotus (I. 178) owes its origin to the establishment of one uniform standard for the dominions of the Great King. In fact no better illustration of what took place can be found than that afforded by our own terms such as imperial pint, or imperial gallon, or in a less degree by the statute acre, as contrasted with the older customary pints, or gallons, or acres. The mistake made by metrologists, in regarding the scientifically constructed Babylonian system as the first beginning of the art of weighing, is just as great as if a person writing a manual of English Metrology were to start with the metric legislation of 1824 as the first beginning of our metrology, and were to try and explain all traces of an earlier system or systems by forcing the facts into some sort of conformity with our modern standards. Undoubtedly in such an effort great facility would be found inasmuch as the present scientific standards are simply the ancient units of the realm accurately defined. But the reader will best understand the relations which probably existed between the Babylonian royal standard (both single and double) by having a short account of the adjustment of our standards laid before him. Great inconvenience having been felt in the United Kingdom for a long time from the want of uniformity in the system of weights and measures, which were in use in different parts of it, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1824 and came into force on January the 1st 1826, by which certain measures and weights therein specified were declared to be the only lawful ones in this realm under the name of imperial weights and measures. It was settled by this Act (1) that a certain yard-measure, made by an order of Parliament in 1760 by a comparison of the yards then in common use, should henceforward be the imperial yard and the standard of length for the kingdom: and that, in case this standard should be lost or injured, it might be recovered from a knowledge of the fact that the length of a pendulum, oscillating in a second in vacuo in the latitude of London and at the level of the sea (which can always be accurately obtained by certain scientific processes), was 39·13929 inches of this yard: (2) that the half of a double pound Troy, made at the same time (1760), should be the Imperial Pound Troy and the standard of weight; and that of the 5760 grains which this pound contains, the pound Avoirdupois should contain 7000; and that, in case this standard should be lost or injured, it might be recovered from the knowledge of the fact that a cubic inch of distilled water at the temperature of 62° Fahrenheit, and when the barometer is at 30 in., weighs 252·458 grains: (3) that the imperial gallon and standard of capacity should contain 277·274 cubic inches (the inch being above defined), which size was selected from its being nearly that of the gallons already, in use, and from the fact that 10 lbs. Avoirdupois of distilled water weighed in air at a temperature of 62° Fahrenheit, and when the barometer stands at 30 in., will just fill this space. On p. 180 we saw that the standard gallon in the Tudor period ultimately depended on the pennyweight, which was, as we found, fixed by being the weight of 32 grains of wheat, dry and taken from the midst of the ear of wheat after the ancient laws of the realm. It was from the descendants of this gallon that the imperial gallon of 1824 was fixed, with a slight modification so as to make it contain 10 lbs. of distilled water weighed in air at a temperature of 62° and when the barometer stands at 30 in. The double pound Troy made in 1760 depended in like fashion for its ultimate origin on the wheat-grains, and it also affords us an interesting illustration of the doubling of the original single unit, such as we find in the heavy royal Babylonian system. We may find further analogies between our own system and that of the Babylonians. Whilst at the Mint gold and silver are weighed for coinage by Troy weight, the copper coinage on the other hand is regulated by the lb. Avoirdupois, the ordinary commercial standard. As already remarked, it is almost certain from the method of elimination that copper was the principal article for which the royal Babylonian system was employed, as gold and silver had separate standards of their own, and corn was sold by measure and not by weight.
To sum up then the results of our enquiry into the Assyrio-Babylonian system, we started with the so-called light shekel or ox-unit as the basis of the system; and found that gold and silver were weighed by it and by its fifty-fold, the maneh, which may have been itself a natural measure of capacity, such as the catty used in Eastern Asia, where we know for certain that this weight was originally a measure of capacity obtained from the joints of bamboos or the cocoanut; that in a certain part of the empire a need was felt for a slightly heavier unit for the weighing of silver and precious commodities such as gums and spices, and that accordingly the great trading Aramaic peoples used the two-fold of the ox-unit (260 grains Troy); that at the earliest period copper would not be sold by weight but would be sold by bars or plates of fixed dimensions, as is still the practice with iron and copper among the barbarous peoples of Further Asia and Africa; that with the advance of culture the art of weighing was extended to copper and other articles of small value in proportion to their bulk, and that, as the maneh, or contents of a gourd, and the load or amount that a man could carry on his back, had been most probably in general use as units for common merchandise, the time came when under the all-mastering authority of the Great King a standard based on the ancient ox-unit, but framed on the new scientific sexagesimal system, was established for copper and certain other kinds of merchandise; that in this system 60 shekels made the maneh, and the load (the kikkar or talent) was adjusted to the new system as the sixty-fold of the maneh; and that in the course of time this higher unit of the kikkar or talent was added to the gold and silver systems, sixty manehs in each case making the kikkar as in the case of the royal or commercial system; that in the case of silver, which on its first discovery and employment was as valuable as gold, and was therefore weighed on the same standard, when in course of time it became about thirteen times less valuable than gold, and there was a difficulty experienced in exchanging the units of gold and silver; a separate standard was created by dividing into ten new parts or shekels the amount of silver which was the equivalent of the gold shekel (ox-unit); that this was probably developed before the royal commercial mina of 60 shekels had been formed, as in that case the silver mina would have contained 60 shekels likewise; we were able to give an explanation of the name royal as applied to the commercial standard by regarding it as of late origin, created by a supreme central authority for the regulation of the commerce of a great empire made up of a heterogeneous mass of races, just as in the present century our own imperial standards have been fixed for the whole kingdom, being based, as was the Babylonian, on an ancient unit empirically obtained; and just as the royal arms are stamped on our imperial standards, so the weights of the Assyrian royal system were shaped in the form of a lion, the symbol of royalty throughout the East. Finally we found that at the base of the Assyrio-Babylonian system lay, as the determinant of the ox-unit or shekel, the grain of wheat, which we have already traced all across Europe into Asia. We can therefore now come to a very reasonable conclusion that the Assyrio-Babylonian weight system was in its origin empirical, and that it was only at a comparatively late date in its history, just as in the case of our own standards, that a certain uniformity between the standards of measures and weights was brought about by the (not complete) application of the sexagesimal system of numeration, the invention of which is their eternal glory.