There is evidence to shew that the Phoenicians from a very early period frequented Euboea, doubtless attracted by its copper mines (from which perhaps the famous city of Chalcis derived its name)38. Round no spot in Hellas do more legends cluster which connect it with Phoenician colonists than Boeotia. It was here that Cadmus settled, and introduced the Phoenician alphabet, it was here according to Greek tradition that Herakles, who is so strongly identified with the Phoenician Melkarth, had his birth. Why then should the Euboeans have been behind the rest of Hellas in receiving the Phoenician standard, which, according to Mr Head, as we saw above, did influence so powerfully the Ionic cities of the Asiatic seaboard, with which their commerce was so largely connected?
From these considerations it follows that before the Greeks came into contact with either Phoenicians or Lydians they had a weight standard of their own, the Talanton of the Homeric Poems, based on the cow, which was as yet only employed for the weighing of gold.
This standard we have found to be identical with one of the two chief standards employed in historical times for silver, and which from first to last was the only standard employed for gold in all parts of Hellas Proper.
As we have seen that gold was to silver in that region as 15:1, there was not much difficulty in regarding fifteen weights or staters of silver as equivalent to one of gold of like weight. Hence there was not the same need in Greece to devise a separate silver standard as there was in Asia, where the relation of the precious metals stood as 13·3:1, a fact which made simple exchange very difficult. On the other hand we have seen that for the Aeginetans and Greeks, who used the so-called Aeginetic standard, the decimal system, the simplest and most primitive method of reckoning, had a powerful attraction.
Primitive peoples perform all their calculations by means of counters, using for such purposes their fingers and toes or seeds or pebbles.