CHAPTER I. The Ox and the Talent in Homer.

The object of this essay is to enquire into the origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards. Since August Boeckh in his metrological enquiries¹ put forth the idea that the weight standards of antiquity had been obtained scientifically, all subsequent writers with scarcely an exception have followed in the same path. This theory was undoubtedly suggested by the fact that the French Republic had established a new scientific metric system. Yet reflection might have shown scholars that even the French system was not a wholly independent outcome of science, for beyond doubt the mètre and litre and hectare were only varieties of older measures of length, capacity and surface, then for the first time scientifically adjusted. The discovery of certain weights of bronze and stone in the ruins of Nineveh, Khorsabad and Babylon lent force to the theory of Boeckh; the imaginations of scholars were excited by the marvellous remains of Chaldaean and Assyrian civilization which had just been brought to light by Sir A. H. Layard, and they hastened to conclude that in the mathematical science of Mesopotamia the source of all weight-standards was to be found. Egypt however put in her claim to priority, and standards based on the measurements of the Great Pyramid, or on the weight of a given quantity of Nile-water, have entered the lists against the astrologers of Chaldaea. This battle still rages hotly, Assyriologists and Egyptologists hurling at each other statements drawn from tablets and papyri, as regards the translation of which no two of these savants are agreed. In spite of this all modern works on metrology start with the systems of Babylon and Egypt and from these they derive the systems of Greece and Italy. It would at least be more scientific to move backwards from the known to the unknown, but beguiled by the