Are we not now justified in supposing that, just as the peoples of Mesopotamia had marked their seasons and time by primitive methods, and used their fingers and hands and feet as measures long before they dreamed of scientific methods, so that likewise they had employed for weighing their gold the natural weight-unit which lay ready to their hands in the wheat-ears that crowned their plains.
Let us now start with the light shekel as our unit. According to our argument it was nothing more than the amount of gold which represented the value of the cow, the unit of barter throughout all Europe, Asia and Africa, as it still is over considerable areas of both the latter continents. There is no reason for not believing that as among other people, all articles of property, utensils, weapons, clothes, ornaments and the various kinds of animals stand to one another in well-known relations of value, so the same principle was in full force among the Semites of Mesopotamia. We found that the wild tribes of Laos had a regular scale commencing with a hoe as their lowest unit, leading up through kettles and porcelain jars to the buffalo, their main unit; we also found that the weight of a grain of corn in gold was equated to a hoe, and that thus by a simple process of multiplication it was easy to ascertain the value of a buffalo in gold. The unit thus attained was kept from fluctuating, as it was known to every one how many grains of corn gave the true weight of the unit. The practical accuracy of this method of fixing monetary units has been demonstrated from the case of the Early English and Mediaeval English silver penny (p. 180). There is complete evidence to show that the light shekel system was older than the heavy system. Firstly the so-called Duck weights with their cuneiform inscriptions point to the fact that Babylonia was the special home of this system, whilst the Lion weights with their Aramaic inscriptions point to a later period, when the Assyrian Empire was in immediate touch with the merchants of Phoenicia. But, in the next place, a far more powerful argument can be drawn from the Hebrew system. In later times the heavy shekel system prevailed in Palestine, in accordance with which the