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Weights of Ancient Palestine Palestine Exploration Quarterly ISSN: 0031-0328 (Print) 1743-1301 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypeq20 Weights of Ancient Palestine E. J. Pilcher To cite this article: E. J. Pilcher (1912) Weights of Ancient Palestine, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 44:4, 178-195, DOI: 10.1179/peq.1912.44.4.178 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/peq.1912.44.4.178 Published online: 19 Jul 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 8 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypeq20 Download by: [Universite Laval] Date: 02 April 2016, At: 01:52 178 WEIGHTS OF ANCIENT PALESTINE. done all that" European magic" combined with the subtle arts of archaeology could do to, penetrate to the true heart and inner mystery of Beth-shemesh. It remains with frie'nds of the--Fund to be liberal with their subscriptions and the rest will be easy . We send them. as greeting across Europe from old Beth-shemesh the stirring refrain of th.e fellahin :~"Water of 'Ain Shems! Water for Deir-Aban !" 'AIN SHEl\IS, August, 1912. WEIGHTS OF ANCIENT PALESTINE. By E. J. PILCHER. (Concluded from Q.S., J'ltly, p. 144.) 3. 11he Assyrian Standard. The Mediterranean systems, whether Greek, or Phoenician, must ultimately have been derived from Babylonia, where the table started from the slle'u, or grain, and ran :- 180 grains make one shekel (§hiliZ,u), 60 shekels make one ,mina (mana), 60 minas make one talent (biltu), the chief difference being that in the native home of the sexa- gesimal notation there was more consistency, and 60 shekels went Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 01:52 02 April 2016 to.the; mina, as well as 60 minas to the talent; just as in the measurement of time, 60 seconds still make one minute,. and 60 minutes one hour. The Babylonian. system of metrology is of great antiquity, and we, find it firmly established in the reign of Dungi, king of Ur (about 2400 B.C.), whose - long reign was a very important one. Dr. I{ing informs us that "in Ur, too, we obtain evidence of an . important administrative reform, by the, recovery of three ,weights for half a maneh, two manehs and twelve manehs respectively. The inscription upon oueo! these states that it h~d been t~sted anrl 'VEIGHTS OF ANCIENT PALESTINE. 17-9 passeda~ of· full weight in, the sealing-house dedicated to N annar. Dungi, in fact, introduced a uniform standard of weights for use "in at least the -Babylonian portion ,of his empire, and he sought to render his enactments with regard to them effective by establishing an official testing-house at Ur, which was probably attached to the temple of the' Moon-god, and conducted under the direction of the central priesthood. Here the original standards were preserved, and all local standards that ,vere intended for use in other cities had, no doubt, to be attested' by the official inscription of the king. It'may be added that in addition to the weights o(his own period that have been recovered, a copy of one has survived, which was made after his stanaard in the N eo-Baby Ionian period."! This latter weight is deposited in the British ~1useum, and it bears a cuneiform inscription to the effect that it was made by Nebuchadrezzar the Great (604-561 B.O.) according to the standard of the mina of Dungi. There is also a ,veight on the same standard, inscribed in Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, with the name of Darius Hystaspes (521-485 B.C.), so that from Dungi to the Persian period the genealogy is complete. We call this system the "Assyrian Standard" because it was first accurately made known to us by the series of Assyrian weights brought by Sir Henry Layard from Nineveh, and ranging in date from 720-680 B.C. By.a comparison of these examples it was established that the royal Assyrian standard mina was 7,800 grains Troy. It is no part of the present essay to discuss the relations of this mina with the ,veight .standards of the lVlediterranean. Dr. C. F. Lehmann-~aupt in 1889 propounded a very ingenious theory by which he sought to prove that all these other standards were derived from the Babylonian by a kind of arithmetical pro- Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 01:52 02 April 2016 gression, and it is 'very striking to see how well many of them do fit into the framework devised by the learned German metrologist; but for our' purpose we need only remark that the Persian king, Darius Hystaspes, received from his Babylonian predecessors the mina of 7;800 grains Troy, and struck his gold coinage upon it. ,Thus his gold piece was a Babylonian shekel, and weighed 130 grains:- 7,800 7 60' = 130 grains. We do not' know what was the Persi.an name for this gold 1 .A. Hls tor!J of Sumer and A.7c7cad,by Leonard 'V. King (London, 1910L p.29J. p 2 180 WEIGHTS OF ANCIENT PALESTINE. shekel, but the· Greeks called'it a capElKos. (from dap€tol;') and we style ita daric. If Darius had divided his min a into fifty parts in the Graeco- Phoenician way we should then have had a unit of 156 grains, 7,800 -;- 50 = 156 grains,· but no such unit was known until quite recently. In 1890 Dr. Thomas Chaplin was travelling near Sanlaria, when his donkey-boy offered an "antika" for his inspection. The "antika" was a small black hematite spjndle, about an inch long, with some .Ancient Weight from Samaria. strange letters upon it, and Dr. Chaplin gave the boy a silver mejidiek, and brought the little object to England, where it was seen that it bore two inscriptions in Phoenician, or Old Hebrew characters~ The writing on one side of the weight was partly obliterated, but the letters on the other side were better pres~rved. The~e two inscriptions were at first read as- and they were a great puzzle to scholars for many year:s, until in Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 01:52 02 April 2016 1902 Dr. Lidzbarski solved the riddle (Ephem., I, p. 13), for in studying' Semitic palaeography, Dr Lidzbarski had co~e to the conclusion that the old Phoenician letter §.ade, \N ,was 'really a development of the shin, W, by the lengthening of the first stroke, and he perceived that on Dr. Chaplin's weight the converse. had been done. The workman had first of all written ~ and then rubbed out part of the stroke, and so left something that might be read as~. What had happened was that the engraver had carelessly omitted the letter nun, and had written ~~ ,l'::l'. Then,. observing the error, he had snloothed t~e surface of the stone, and engraved WEIGHTS OF ANCIENT PALESTINE. 181 the correct words, ~:lj ~:l', on the other side., The workman could not rub away very nluch because that would have :made the weight too light to be of use, and therefore he left traces of the earlier inscription, which misled scholars for years. Consequently there was, no justification for the furious controversy which raged in 1893 and 1894 over this little relic of antiquity, which weighs 39'2 grains, and now reposes in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. 3,':1' is the ordinary Hebrew word .for quarter, but ~~j is an entirely new combination. We do not even knowho,v it was pronounced; but, for the purpose of transliteration, it has provision- ally been vocalized as ne§.eph, so that Dr. Chaplin's weight was a "quarter nefJ,eph." In Ar~bic a very similar form ~, ni§f, is the ordinary word for half, but this does not help us to· explain the Hebrew: it only adds a deeper mystery. In 1892 Mr. Herbert Clark, the American Vice-Consul at Jerusalem, was shown some antiquities by a peasant who had opened an ancient grave at 'Anata (the Biblical Anathoth), a little to the north ofJ erusalem, and there found the remains of a string of beads. The end bead was of common stone of a reddish-yellow colour, .and instead of being perfectly globular, like most beads, it was almost hemispherical, and had engraved upon it·the three letters ~:lj; in fact, the same strange word as had .been noted on Dr. Chaplin's weight. The bead 'only weighed 134 grains, whereas the complete ne$eph ought to be about 156'8, if the Chaplin weight were a quarter of it; but probably the difference was due to loss of substance ·in drilling the hole for threading .the bead on a string. ~1. Clermont-Ganneau made the very happy suggestion that some person in ancient times had come across this Old Hebrew weight, and, seeing the unfamiliar writing Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 01:52 02 April 2016 upon it, he had concluded that it possessed; some magical virtue. He had therefore drilled a hole through the stone .and suspended it at the end of a string of beads, in order to preserve the good luck of the magical inscription. in 1899 Dr. 'Bliss and ~lr. R. A. S. Macalister were engaged in the excavation of an ancient site called' Tell Zakariya, and at a depth of five or six feet from the surface they found three inscribed dome- sha ped' stone weights, each bearing this .mysterious word ~~j.' on the top of it.
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