The first voyage undertaken to the ancient El Dorado may have been to search for the region from whence came the gold, somewhat in the fashion that in after-times Pytheas of Massalia sallied forth to investigate the sources of the tin and amber which reached Marseilles overland from Britain and the Baltic. After weighing these considerations we shall be careful to avoid any dogmatic declarations as to the origin of the word _mana_. One thing however is clear, and that is that the ancient Hindus were employing certain lumps of gold probably of uniform size in Vedic times, as we saw[317]. The Indians of the Vedic times had thus a gold unit of their own (and as we have shown above probably based on the value of a cow) before they as yet knew the use of silver or had as yet reached the sea in their downward advance into the peninsula of Hindustan. Even granting that they borrowed the _Manā_ from Babylonia, it is plain that they had already their own gold unit, for otherwise instead of employing _hiranya pinda_, a most primitive term meaning only _gold-lump_, they would certainly have borrowed the term _shekel_ along with the _maneh_. But the fact of most importance for us at present is that, whether _maneh_ be Semitic or Aryan, in either case it seems to mean not a _weight_ but a _measure_. It will be remembered that we found the _catty_ or pound of Further Asia was in origin a natural unit of capacity, as was shown by its Cambodian name _neal_, which simply means a cocoa-nut, and that we found in China the joints of the bamboo of certain sizes serving as their measures of capacity, and both cocoa-nuts and bamboo joints among the Malays of the Indian Isles. This will naturally suggest the question, Is it possible that the _maneh_ had a somewhat similar origin? Was some natural object, such as the gourd, which is at the present moment the ordinary unit of capacity at Zanzibar, taken to serve as a measure of liquids or of corn? It is probable that the Greek _cyathus_ (κύαθος) like its Latin congener _cucurbita_ meant originally some kind of gourd. But there is a certain amount of probability that the Semitic peoples used gourds in primitive times for vessels, not simply from _à priori_ considerations, but from the fact that the most archaic pottery obtained by Mr Petrie from his excavations on the site of the ancient city of Lachish in 1890 show unmistakable signs of being modelled after the shape of a gourd. Although the Chinese never have employed their _ching_ (catty) for the precious metals, yet the Cambodians have advanced to counting silver not only by the _catty_ but also by the _picul_. Did then the Babylonians make 50 shekels of gold or silver roundly equal to their _maneh_ or measure of capacity? This is of course pure speculation, but it is at least supported by the comparison of what has actually taken place elsewhere; and even from the empire of the Great King himself can we get an insight into the method by which the _maneh_