We next advance towards the East and take up the Semitic systems. We have already had occasion to touch upon that of the Arabs when dealing with the modern Persians. “There can be little doubt,” says Queipo (I. 360), “that the Arab system of weight was based on the grain of wheat.” The habba was their smallest unit. Four habbas are equal to 1 karat, the latter of course representing the keration or siliqua, and the former the 4 sitaria or wheat-grains, which we saw were its equivalent. This is the most ordinary value given to the karat in Makrizi and the other Arabic writers on Metrology, but occasionally we find the karat made equal to only 3 grains, which of course are barley-corns. We saw above that in the Persian system the nashod was formerly divided into 4 habbi of ·048 gram (which is plainly the weight of the wheat-grain), whilst now it is divided into 3 grains each of ·063 which represents the barley-corn, or in other words the Troy grain of ·064 gram. Of course the objection might be raised that as the Arabs had borrowed their higher denominations such as the dirhem (δραχμή) and dinar (denarius, δηνάριον), from the Greeks and Romans, and as their standard weight the mithkal is nothing more than the sextula or ⅙ of the Roman ounce, employed in the eastern Empire under the name of exagion (ἐξάγιον, whence comes the saggio of Marco Polo), so too their wheat-corns and barley-corns were not of their own devising, but likewise adventitious. After what we have seen above (p. 166) to be the practice of primitive people in the selling of gold, a traffic in which the Arabs had been engaged for many ages, it would seem hardly necessary to reply to such an argument, but as a more complete answer can be given in the course of the last portion of this enquiry, we shall deal with it in that place.
We now come to the Assyrians themselves, from the discovery of whose weights in the shape of lions and ducks, the whole modern theory of a scientific origin for all the weight standards of the Greeks as well as