To commence our constructive part with a country where we are confronted with such an array of separate coinages and of diverse standards would be unwise if it were possible to start from some region where there was a single central authority, and consequently less diversity of standards. We are thus led to choose either Egypt or Babylonia as our starting point. The former presents to us a system less developed and more simple than the latter. In fact we are tolerably well justified, in view of recent discussion, in regarding all that is more complex in the system of Egypt as borrowed from Babylonia. Yet it must not be supposed that we escape all difficulties in thus starting with Egypt. If in Hellas we found ourselves embarrassed by the wealth of coinages, in Egypt on the other hand we have no native coinage to guide us, for it was only after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander that under the Greek dynasty founded by Ptolemy Lagos the essentially Greek art of coining was introduced into Egypt. We depend therefore for our knowledge of Egyptian standards upon the actual weighings of weight-pieces and such information as can be gleaned from the ancient Egyptian documents. The same holds good likewise on the whole for the Assyrian system, where however the actual weight-pieces and statements derived from cuneiform inscriptions can in some degree be supported by collateral evidence. At the same time we must be careful not to assign as much importance to the literary evidence supplied to us by Egyptian hieroglyphic or Assyrian cuneiform as we do to the records of Greece or Rome. The keys to the former have only been obtained within the present century, and many of the translations of such documents given us by that brilliant band of savants who have opened to us the portals of a Past far exceeding in antiquity the most remote epoch of which the literatures of Greece and Rome contain even any tradition, must at the best in many cases be considered only as tentative.