The large size of many of the weights caused scholars to fix their attention entirely on the larger units, and ever since then all the various efforts to reconstruct the Assyrio-Babylonian weight system have had if nothing else in common at least this that they have all commenced to build the pyramid from the top downwards. They all took the highest units, the talent or mina, as their starting-point, and proceeded to evolve from thence the small unit or shekel. Yet all the evidence of antiquity pointed in the opposite direction. In the Greek system, which those scholars held to be borrowed from the East, it was the small unit which was called the stater or "weigher," indicating clearly that it was regarded as the real basis of the standard.
Again the Phoenicians and Hebrews who from the earliest times were in constant contact with Mesopotamia ought certainly to exhibit traces in their earliest extant records of the mina and talent, if it was from these units that the weight-system started. Yet that is not the evidence afforded by the Old Testament. There is no mention of a mina except in Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, and Ezekiel, all books of late date. In the Book of Genesis where sums of money are mentioned, they are reckoned by shekels and nothing else. So when Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah for 600 pieces of silver, what could have been more convenient than to describe the purchase money as consisting of 12 manahs (minas)[1]? Thus, as we shall see later on, the conclusion to be drawn from the ancient Hebrew writings is the same as that which we draw from the Homeric Poems, that it is the shekel (or stater), the small unit, which was the first to be employed, and that it was only in the course of time that the higher units, the mina and the talent, make their appearance. If according to the common theory the weight standards were the actual creations of either Chaldaeans or Egyptians and only borrowed from them by other peoples, why do we not find the higher units appearing from the first amongst those supposed borrowers, if the other part of the theory is true, that they started from a high unit?
- ↑ If, as is held by some of the best critics, this is a late passage, there is an a fortiori argument against the early use of the mina.
