CHAPTER VIII. How were Primitive Weight Units fixed?

here as well as in India, where we found it at a period anterior to Muhammadan conquest, indicates that in Persia it existed likewise from the earliest times. The close relationship between the ancient Hindus and ancient Persians makes it all the more likely. It is also pointed out that formerly the nashod was divided into three instead of four grains. As the Arabs divide their karat into four habbas, it is all the more likely that the 3 barley-corns = 1 nashod belong to the ancient system.

The Arab weight system is based on the grain of wheat, four of which make a karat (the seed of the carob or St John’s Bread)¹⁰. Occasionally in the Arab writers mention is made of a karat divided into 3 habbas¹⁰. The weight of the karat remains unchanged, but the grains in this case are barley grains, since, as we shall see presently, 3 grains of barley are equal to 4 grains of wheat (·063 × 3 = ·047 × 4).

It will now be most convenient for us to begin in the extreme west, and once more from that work back towards the coast of the Aegean Sea, in which our chief interest must always be centred.

Whether the Kelts of Ireland had any indigenous weight system or not, we have no direct evidence, although we do know as a fact that when Caesar landed in Kent he found the Britons employing coins of gold and bronze, and bars (or according to some MSS. rings) of iron adjusted to a fixed weight. However the earliest Irish documents reveal that people using a system of weights for silver directly borrowed from the older Roman system (although it is likely that they had a native standard for gold). As the solidus and denarius became the chief units of Europe from the time of Constantine the Great (336 A.D.), the Irish probably received their system at an earlier date.