CHAPTER X. The Systems of Egypt, Babylon, and Palestine.

The first voyage undertaken to the ancient El Dorado may have been to search for the region from whence came the gold, somewhat in the fashion that in after-times Pytheas of Massalia sallied forth to investigate the sources of the tin and amber which reached Marseilles overland from Britain and the Baltic. After weighing these considerations we shall be careful to avoid any dogmatic declarations as to the origin of the word mana. One thing however is clear, and that is that the ancient Hindus were employing certain lumps of gold probably of uniform size in Vedic times, as we saw²⁴. The Indians of the Vedic times had thus a gold unit of their own (and as we have shown above probably based on the value of a cow) before they as yet knew the use of silver or had as yet reached the sea in their downward advance into the peninsula of Hindustan. Even granting that they borrowed the Manā from Babylonia, it is plain that they had already their own gold unit, for otherwise instead of employing hiranya pinda, a most primitive term meaning only gold-lump, they would certainly have borrowed the term shekel along with the maneh. But the fact of most importance for us at present is that, whether maneh be Semitic or Aryan, in either case it seems to mean not a weight but a measure. It will be remembered that we found the catty or pound of Further Asia was in origin a natural unit of capacity, as was shown by its Cambodian name neal, which simply means a cocoa-nut, and that we found in China the joints of the bamboo of certain sizes serving as their measures of capacity, and both cocoa-nuts and bamboo joints among the Malays of the Indian Isles. This will naturally suggest the question, Is it possible that the maneh had a somewhat similar origin? Was some natural object, such as the gourd, which is at the present moment the ordinary unit of capacity at Zanzibar, taken to serve as a measure of liquids or of corn? It is probable that the Greek cyathus (κύαθος) like its Latin congener cucurbita meant originally some kind of gourd. But there is a certain amount of probability