“But why it was that the light mina rather than the heavy one had become domesticated in Lydia must remain unexplained. We know however that one of the Assyrian weights is spoken of in cuneiform inscriptions as the ‘_weight of Carchemish_.’ If then the modern hypothesis of a Hittite dominion in Asia Minor turn out to be well founded, the _weight of Carchemish_ might by means of the Hittites have found its way to Phrygia and Lydia, and as the earliest Lydian coins are regulated according to the divisions of the Light Assyrian mina this would probably be the one alluded to. “From these two points then, _Phoenicia_ on the one hand and _Lydia_ (through Carchemish), on the other, the two Babylonian units of weight appear to have started westwards to the shores of the Aegean sea, the heavy shekel by way of Phoenicia, the lighter shekel by way of Lydia.” So far I have thought it but right to give Mr Head’s exposition _in extenso_, that the enquirer may be enabled to fully grasp the principles of the orthodox school, before we enter on any criticism of them. I shall now treat more summarily all that remains to be said. Let us briefly state the peculiar doctrines of two leading continental metrologists. The veteran Dr Hultsch derives all standards of weight thus: The royal Babylonian cubit was based on the sun’s apparent diameter; the cube of this measure gave the _maris_, the weight in water of one-fifth of which was the royal Babylonian talent, which was divided into 60 _manehs_ (_minae_) and each mina in turn into 60 shekels. For silver and gold however they formed their standard by taking _fifty_ shekels to form a mina[253]: thus after elaborating with such care a scientific system, they abandoned it as soon as they came to deal with the precious metals. M. Soutzo[254] in a clever essay has maintained that all the weight systems both monetary and commercial of Asia, Egypt, Greece, come from one primordial weight the Egyptian _uten_ (96 grammes), or from its tenth, the _kat_ (9·60 grammes). He ascribes the origin of these weights to an extremely remote epoch not far perhaps from the time of the discovery of bronze in Asia, and the invention of the first instruments for weighing: he considers also that bronze _by weight_ was the first money employed in Asia, Egypt, and Italy, and that everywhere the decimal system of numeration has preceded the sexagesimal. The evidence which we have produced in the earlier part of this work has I trust convinced the reader that gold, not copper, was the first object to be weighed; M. Soutzo’s assumption that the _uten_ is the primordial unit is upset even for the Egyptians themselves by the passage already cited from Horapollo (p. 129). _The invention of coinage._