The persistence, side by side, of the two stand- ards, the heavj^ and the light, exidains how the heavj' mina might by one writer be taken as con- taining 50 heavy sliekels, by another a» containing loo light shekels. Thus it is that the weight of Solomon's smaller shields is given in 1 K 10" aa three (heavy) nuna.s,* but in the parallel passage
• The mlno (njp) ig here flrat nut with In OT. El8cwher» only Ezr2^, Neh T^if- (in all three passa^'cB rendered 'pound in EV), Ezk t&i'' where It U transliterated 'maneh,' and Da
904 WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
WEIGHTS AND .MEASURES
(2 Cli 9") as 300 (light) shekels, assuming, that is, that the text of both passages is intact. If the ex- planation given elsewhere (Money, vol. iii. p. 421'') of the new denomination, darkemon, found only in the historiial work, Chronicles - Ezra - Nehe- raiah, is correct, that we have here a Hebraized form of the Greek 5pax,"^, we have further con- tirniation of the prevalence in the Persian and early Greek periods of the light, in preference to the heavy, shekel. The weight of 1000 drachms (AV 'drams,' RV 'darics,' Ezr 8"), for example, is undoubtedly 1000 of the light Perso-Babyloniau shekel on the royal standard, viz. 130 grains (see above), the theoretical value of the Persian daric.
The same weight is most probably intended by the unique expression employed to indicate the weight of Absalom's hair, viz. '200 shekels after the king's weight' (:ij>sri jax?* 2 S \i'\ The con- text of this verse is now regarded as a pcst-exilic addition to the original narrative (Budde, Thenius- Lbhr, H. P. Smith) ; and, since the plirase i.s paral- lel to the legends on the lion weights of Nineveh, we may safely understand the sliekel in question to be the light Persian unit of 130 grains, giving a total weight of 26,000 grains, or 3f lb. avoirdupois. If the legend of Bel and the Dragon, as is possible, had its home in Egypt, the ' 30 minas of pitch' in this curious storj' (v.^ LXX) are the Ptolemaic trade minas, which we have seen to be identical with the light mina of the earliest Baby- lonian weights ; and thus we return at the close of this section to the point from wliich we set out. iii. (6) The new Syrian or 320-grain unit. — Refer- ence has already been made to the interesting fact that the tribute of the vassal-states of Syria and Palestine in the reign of Thothmes III. (c. I.")(i0 B.C.) when expressed in terms of the Egyptian weiglit-system, based on the ket with its decimal multiple, the deben or uten, runs to irregular numbers and even fractions of the ket, whereas its original weight must have been hundreds and thousands of shekels. Various attempts have been made recently (see Brugsch, Z.f. Aegypt. Sprache, 1889, 22 a'., 87 ti'., Z.f. Etknologie, 1889, 36fl'. ; Lehmann, Verkandl. d. berl. Gcs.f. Anthropologic, 1889, 272 f. ; Hultsch, Gewichte d. AUertums, 25 f., 119 f.) to determine the value of the shekel or shekels by which this tribute was weighed. These attempts, however, can yield but doubtful results, owing, for one thing, to the considerable range in the value of the ket, as sliown by actual weights. Thus, to take a .'simple illustration, in Thothmes' 34th year ' the tribute of the provinces of the land of Retennu [Syria] ' was in ' gold 55 dchcn 8 ket ' (Petrie, Hi.'it. of Egypt, ii. 118). Now, if we take the ket as fixed by Lepsius, Hultscli, and others at 140 grains, it will be found that 558 ket rejiresent 620 shekels of 126 grains, or 600 shekels of 1302 grains, on the ' royal ' or later daric standard, without a remainder in either case. On the otlier hand, we have only to take 14335 grains as a mean value of actual ket weights to get 558 /;<;< = 80,000 grains, or 10 light minas of the common norm, raised 5 per cent, as explained above. We have been led to this result by fresh evidence, unknown to the writers just cited, to which we now turn. In the
on either side of which were engraved a number ol early Heb. characters. The correct decipherment and interpretation of these gave rise to a somewliat heated controversy in various periodicals, in which Professors Robertson Smith, Sayce, Driver, and others took part (see PEFSt, 1890, 267 ; 1891, 69 i 1893, -22 ; 1894, 220, 284 ti'. ; 1895, 187 ff.). With the help of other inscribed weights still more recently discovered by Dr. Bliss in Southern Palestine, one
32>
Jt^
7^1 I A.1
. half- ^ imlf? jl
WHIQHT 0, WEIGHTS D AND ■.
A>'CIENT HEBRBW WKaHTB FROM 801'TIIERN PALESTINK.
of the two doubtful words on the Chaplin weight is now made out with tolerable certainty to be ii}, a Heb. word from the same root as the Arabic nusf, meaning 'half,' first suggested by Professor Euting in 1890 (in Konig's Einleit. in d. A '/', 425). The second doubtful word (Sr), on which the controversy mainly turned, is apparently an ablireviation of the familiar Sb?" (Conder, PEFSt, 1891, 69 ; Clermont-Ganneau, ib. 1899, 208, and, more decidedly, Reeueil d'archiol. orientate, iv. (1900) 24 ff., where a full discussion of these early weights wUl be found), the limited space available perhaps causing the omission of the p. The evi- dence of the Chaplin and otlier weights, five in all, may best be presented in tabular form thus —