regulation amount of gold or silver, and were often of light weight. * The rings of gold in the Museum at Leyden, which were used as a basis of exchange, are made on the Chaldæo-Babylonian pattern, and belong to the Asiatic system. [Illustration: 118.jpg one of the forms of egyptian scales] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a sketch by Rosellini They had to be weighed at every fresh transaction in order to estimate their true value, and the interested parties never missed this excellent opportunity for a heated discussion: after having declared for a quarter of an hour that the scales were out of order, that the weighing had been carelessly performed, and that it should be done over again, they at last came to terms, exhausted with wrangling, and then went their way fairly satisfied with one another.* It sometimes happened that a clever and unscrupulous dealer would alloy the rings, and mix with the precious metal as much of a baser sort as would be possible without danger of detection. The honest merchant who thought he was receiving in payment for some article, say eight tabnû of fine gold, and who had handed to him eight tabnû of some alloy resembling gold, but containing one-third of silver, lost in a single transaction, without suspecting it, almost one-third of his goods. The fear of such counterfeits was instrumental in restraining the use of tabnû for a long time among the people, and restricted the buying and selling in the markets to exchange in natural products or manufactured objects. * The weighing of rings is often represented on the monuments from the XVIIIth dynasty onwards. I am not acquainted with any instance of this on the bas-reliefs of the Ancient Empire. The giving of false weight is alluded to in the paragraph in the “Negative Confession,” in which the dead man declares that he has not interfered with the beam of the scales (cf. vol. i. p. 271) _civili,_ pl. lii. 1. As to the construction of the Egyptian scales, and the working of their various parts, see Flinders Petrie’s remarks in _A Season in Egypt_, P- 42, and the drawings which he has brought together on pl. xx. of the same work. [Illustration: 118b.jpg SCENES IN A BAZAAR] We must, perhaps, agree with Fr. Lenormant, in his conclusion that the only kind of national metal of exchange in use in Egypt was a copper wire or plate bent thus [--]. this being the sign invariably used in the hieroglyphics in writing the word _tàbnû_.