[Illustration: FIG. 23. Lion weight.] [Illustration: FIG. 24. Assyrian half-shekel weight of the so-called Duck type[302]. _A._ Side view showing cuneiform symbol = ½. _B._ View from above.] Much has been written in the last thirty years concerning what is known as the _Assyrio-Babylonian_ system: in fact so much has been written that it is difficult to find out the data amidst the masses of theory. What then are the facts which we have to go upon? Whence do we get the name _Babylonian_? Herodotus[303] tells us that when Darius imposed on his subjects a fixed quota of tribute instead of the occasional gifts and contributions which were brought to the king’s treasury under the reigns of his predecessors Cyrus and Cambyses, those “who brought silver got orders to bring a talent of Babylonian weight whilst those who brought gold one of Euboic weight. But the Babylonian talent amounts to seventy Euboic minas.” Properly speaking then according to the ancients, the only specific Babylonian talent was one employed for silver and which was one-sixth heavier than the Euboic talent. It is to be noted carefully that the standard employed for the weighing of gold is not regarded by Herodotus as peculiar to Babylon or Persia, but is treated as identical with the common Euboic standard which was used for silver in many parts of Greece, and the stater of which was the only standard employed for gold in Greece, even in those states where the Aeginetic system was in use for their silver currency. Thus in the system employed for gold in the empire of the Great King the mina contained 50 staters, and the talent 60 minas. But the discovery of the weights known as the Lion and the Duck weights by Sir A. H. Layard at Nineveh whilst from one point of view most fortunate, from another may be regarded as the reverse. The large size of many of the weights caused scholars to fix their attention entirely on the larger units, and ever since then all the various efforts to reconstruct the Assyrio-Babylonian weight system have had if nothing else in common at least this that they have all commenced to build the pyramid from the top downwards. They all took the highest units, the talent or mina, as their starting-point, and proceeded to evolve from thence the small unit or _shekel_. Yet all the evidence of antiquity pointed in the opposite direction. In the Greek system, which those scholars held to be borrowed from the East, it was the small unit which was called the _stater_ or “weigher,” indicating clearly that it was regarded as the real basis of the standard.