VOL. 111.—27
MONEY 417
Walker, Ridgeway, Babelon (Les origines de la monnaie, 1897), Lenormant (La monnaie dans Vantiquité, 2nd ed. 1897), Poole (art. ‘Numismatics’ in Eneycl. Brit.*), and others—fall without the scope of an article on the money in circulation among the Hebrews in the various periods of their national life. This more limited, but still suffi- ciently extensive, section of ancient numismatics we propose to study under the following heads :—
A. Uscornep ΜΟΝΕΥ͂ BErURE THE EXILR. 1. Money in Palestine before the Conquest. The principal weight-standards of antiquity. 2. Hebrew money from the Conquest to the Exile, Sterling value of the Shekel. B. Corxep Monzy FROM THE EXILE TO THE REIGN oF NERO.
8. The Coinage of Darius and his successors. The ‘Shekel of the Sanctuary.’ Coins of the Pheenician cities.
4. The Coinage of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and of the autonomous cities of Phonicia, to the death of Simon
Maccabieus.
6. The first Jewish Coinage (copper) under John Hyrcanus. The question of the so-called Maccabiean shekels. Bronze (copper) Coins of the Hasmonwan princes.
6. Coins of the Idumman princes.
7. The Roman Imperial Coinage, including the Coins of the Procurators.
8. Coins of preceding §§ mentioned in the NT.
C. Tue Cos or THE REvOLTs.
9. The Coinage of the First Revolt (a.p. 66-70).
10. The Coinage of the Second Revolt (a.p. 132-135).
11. Appendix. The purchasing power of money in Bible times,
Literature.
A. UNCOINED MONEY FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE EXILE.
81. Money in Palestine before the Conquest. The principal weight - standards of antiquity.— The oldest traditions of the Hebrews, as these have come down to us, do not reach back to the time when trade was still carried on by the primi- tive system of barter. Already in the patriarchal age the existence of a metallic currency is assumed (cf. Gn 1718. ‘he that is bought with thy money,’ mBp2, lit. “ oF silver,’ and 23". cited below); and rightly so, for, as we now know, the land of Canaan was even at this early period far ad- vanced in the arts of civilization, including the use of the precious metals as media of exchange. For the century immediately preceding the Hebrew conquest we have the contemporary evidence of the Tel el-Amarna letters, which show not only that gold and silver were in daily use as money, that is, as media in terms of which all other merchan- dise was valued, but also that already the ‘nar- rowing lust of gold’ had asserted its empire over men (see Hugo Winckler’s or other rendering, passim). The value, in other words, the pur- chasing power of these metals, was determined by their weight—a fact which renders some acquaint- ance with the metrology of the ancients an indis-
nsable preliminary to the study of their money.
‘ortunately, the question of the origin and inter-
relation of the weight-standards of antiquity—one of the most complicated in the whole range of Oriental archeology — will be discussed in the article WEIGHTS AND MEAsuRES. It will suffice, therefore, in this place to sketch in the barest outline the results of the most recent metrological research, taking as our guide the elaborate treatise of the veteran metrologist, Friedrich Hultsch, Die Gewichte des Alterthums nach ihrem Zusam- menhange dargestelit (Leipzig, 1898; ef. C. F. Lehmann, Sitzungsberichte der archdolog. Gesell- schaft zu Berlin, 1888, and esp. the same scholar’s Das altbabylonische Maas- und Gewichtssystem, Leyden, 1893; also G. F. Hill, A Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins, 1899, p. 26 ff.).
Proceeding from the simpler to the more com- plex, we begin with the weight-system of Zgypt,
418 MONEY
MONEY
a system characterized by extreme simplisity: y
Two weights only were in use from very ear times—the ket (also transliterated kat, kita, qedt, ete.), of 140 grains, and its multiple the deben (also transliterated uten, tabnu, ete.), equal to ten ket, or a little over 1400 grains (Hultsch, 1403°5 grs.). The Rhind mathematical papyrus, which dates from the Hyksos period, contains, according to an excel- lent authority, the earliest reference in Egyptian literature to the metals as standards of value. ‘It is not known,’ says Mr. Griflith in his im- portant essay, ‘Notes on Egyptian Weights and Measures,’ in PSBA xiv. p. 486 ff., ‘how far back into antiquity true money, t.e. pieces of defi- uite weight and value, can be traced. About the wme of the 18th Dynasty we know that the precious metals were kept in dust, in ingots, and in ornamental forms,- but more especially in rings, and it is almost certain that the important weight- name uten has the root- meaning of a ring or coiled wire. It is well known not only that the metals were bought and sold by weight, but further, that goods of all kinds might be valued at a certain weight of metal in order to be ex- changed against each other.’ One of the most frequently reproduced of contemporary illustra- tions of the daily life of the Egyptians is the weigher with his balance* and scales, the stone weights of various animal forms (ox, or ox-head only, pazells, ete.) in the one scale balancing in the other the rings of precious metal, which ap- pear to have had ‘a uniform diameter of about 5 inches’ (Erman, Egypt, 464).
The Egyptian Emule inscriptions contain numer- ous lists of the amount of tribute paid to successive Pharaohs by the kings and peoples of Syria, the best known being that inscribed on the walls of the great temple of Amon at Karnak by order of Thothmes 1Π|. (frequently published ; see histories of Brugsch, Petrie, ete., under Thothmes). From the mass of detail in this list three typical entries may he selected as having an important bearing on the topic of this section. (1) The tribute of Naharina in Thothmes’ thirty-third year (B.c. 1471 ace. to Mahler’s chronology) consisted, inter alia, of 45 deben 1 ket of gold ; (2) that of ‘the great Khita,’ or Hittites, comprised among other items 8 silver rings weighing 301 deben; (3) in the thirty-fourth year ‘the tribute of the princes of the land of Retennu,’ or Palestine, shows, inter alia, 55 deben 8 ket of gold. From these and similar fractional weights (454 deben, 55+ deben, and, since we know that the gold and silver rings were accurately adjusted to definite weights, the curious number 301 deben) metrologists have long suspected that the tribute here specified had been re-weighed before being entered as above by the Egyptian recorder, its original weight having been in terms of another system and in whole numbers (J. Brandis, Das Minz-, Maas-, und Gewichts- wesen in Vorderasien, 1866, p. 91 ff.; Fr. Hultsch, Griechische und rémische Metrologie, zweite Bearbeitung, 1882, 374 ff. [this work to be often cited in the sequel as Hultsch, Metrol.*] ; id. Gewichte des Alterthuwms, 1898, 25 ff.). This second weight-system in use in Syria and Palestine in the 15th cent. B.C., it was inferred, could onl be that known as the Babylonian system. This inference was raised to a certainty by the dis- covery of the Tel el-Amarna clay tablets, which con- clusively proved the exclusive use of the Babylonian weights by all the peoples of Mesopotamia and Syria at the date in question.t Here we find not only