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Carleton
Study Gives Current Values to Ancient Weights
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2001; Page A11
Achilles was in a generous mood. There would be a chariot race, and he would
supply prizes for the first five finishers. Fourth prize, according to Homer,
was "two talents of gold."
How much was that?
Well, it wasn't as much as first prize, a woman "skilled in all useful arts,"
along with a three-legged cauldron, or second prize, "a six-year-old mare,
unbroken and in foal to a he-ass," or third prize, "a goodly cauldron that
had never yet been on the fire," but it was better than fifth, "a two-handled
urn as yet unspoiled by smoke."
So how much was it?
Since the race was held in Troy, in what is now western Turkey, Homer was
probably talking about Aegean talents, which weighed 31.6 kilograms apiece.
Two talents weighed 63.2 kilos or 139 pounds.
This is a lot of gold -- worth $578,205.60 at last Wednesday's London Bullion
Market price of $284.55 per troy (no relation to the ancient city) ounce. But
even though those were heroic times, it should be noted that no one knows the
value of 139 pounds of gold in constant 1200 B.C. dollars.
Archaeologists have been trying for years to compute weights from the ancient
world, but it is a daunting task. While evidence shows there were many
different systems, there is not enough evidence to translate measures from
one system to another easily. Today's competition between the English and
metric systems is simple by comparison.
But archaeologists Alfredo Mederos of Madrid's Universidad Complutense and
C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University have developed conversion tables
enabling scholars to translate 11 Bronze Age weight systems into modern
metric equivalents.
The work, published in Friday's issue of the journal Nature, starts from the
certainty "that different regions maintained commercial relationships from
India to the eastern Mediterranean," Mederos said in an interview. So if an
Indus Valley merchant wanted to send something to Crete, he said, merchants
along the way had to be able to convert weights to move the object from one
system to the next.
Previous efforts to compare Bronze Age measuring systems focused on the
weights themselves, usually made of carved or marked stones, and texts,
mostly in cuneiform, describing international business transactions. By
determining equivalencies in two contiguous systems, and then in two others,
researchers theoretically jumped from place to place until they had
constructed a table for the entire Middle Eastern subcontinent.
"But there are too many pieces of evidence lacking and too many loose ends
flapping in the breeze," said Northern Illinois University Middle East
historian Marvin Powell, an expert on ancient Mesopotamia. "This system was
criticized early in the 20th century and discarded. The evidence simply is
not there."
Mederos and Lamberg-Karlovsky took a different approach. They examined single
transactions in single weight systems, arguing that the mathematical
conversion models used by Bronze Age merchants to ship objects across borders
had to have been relatively simple. "Things had to get there so that no one
suffered a loss," Mederos said.
The study begins by describing individual systems: The Mesopotamian talent,
for instance, weighs 30.8 kilograms. Each talent contained 60 minas of 513
grams each, or 3,600 Mesopotamian shekels, each one weighing 8.55 grams.
By using simple formulas to add or subtract weight, "generally in multiples
of two or five," the study suggests that merchants were able to make
calculations "elegant in their simplicity" to express the weight of an object
in a different system.
Thus, Mederos and Lamberg-Karlovsky said, a 1,370-gram piece of lapis lazuli
traveling west from Afghanistan would weigh 100 Dilmun-Indus shekels in
Dilmun near the modern Persian Gulf port of Bahrain; 160 Mesopotamian shekels
(100 plus 50 plus 10) in what is modern Iraq; and 208 Aegean shekels (100
plus 100 plus 5 plus 2 plus 1) in Crete.
For much of the Bronze Age, money didn't exist, Mederos said, but weights
frequently served as "an expression of value -- somebody would say, for
instance, 'I will sell you this cow for two shekels of silver.' "
This is probably the main reason many of yesteryear's words for weight --
such as shekel -- are today's words for money. A talent, like the silver
offered by Achilles in "The Iliad," was generally reckoned to be the weight
of a standard "load" that could be carried by a grown man.
Apart from arithmetic, however, Powell warned that analysis of ancient
weights is extremely tricky for several reasons: Scholars who buy them in
antiquities markets often do not know their place of origin; a serious
merchant, by definition, would own weights from different systems, making it
difficult to know which were local. It is extremely difficult to shave stones
manually, particularly at lower weights, so weights that are supposed to
match most often do not.
"If you look at thousands [of the weights], you see the problem," Powell
said. "In every 100 weights, you get five that weigh a mina or above and 95
that are very small. When you get down to half shekel, third shekel, sixth
shekel, they had a lot of trouble making them accurately."
The historical record of the Bronze Age Middle East has huge gaps, he added.
While people "probably began weighing things" about 3000 B.C., he said, the
oldest written evidence only dates "from 2600 to 2400 B.C." in Babylonia,
where transactions were recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets.
And Babylonia is the only place with written evidence over a long period of
time, said Powell, which was fine because "everybody west of the Euphrates
uses cuneiform to the end of the Bronze Age [1200 B.C.], but then they shift
to the alphabet and quit writing on clay."
Everything after that, he said, "is gone," making it impossible to decipher
individual weight systems, let alone compare them to others. "If you're
willing to fantasize, you can come up with anything," he said. "This field
attracts a great many crazy people."
Money arose around the end of the Bronze Age, Mederos said, but not to
facilitate business transactions. "It was to pay mercenaries," he said.
"Soldiers were becoming specialists, and it was necessary to pay them in cash
instead of textiles or clothing."
Silver quickly became the preferred currency, Powell said, because it was
reasonably portable and not as rare as gold, which was worth nine times as
much. Gold is worth about 60 times as much as silver today, which would
indicate, as suspected, that Achilles's fourth prize was considerably more
modest than today's bullion market might suggest.
However, Powell said, even though gold briefly became more prevalent right
around the time of the Trojan War, silver remained the West's main exchange
medium until the third century A.D., when the Roman Empire, in steep decline,
began spiking its coinage with copper -- the ancient equivalent of printing
money. Emperor Constantine had to shift to a gold standard to stop runaway
inflation.
� 2001 The Washington Post Company
