杏吧原创

IN AN age when people seem incapable of translating pounds into kilograms,
it鈥檚 a surprise to learn that merchants in the ancient world routinely handled
conversions between several different weighing systems. 鈥淚n antiquity, they
could deal with at least 10 systems,鈥� says Clifford Lamberg-Karlovsky, an
archaeologist at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

Lamberg-Karlovsky and his colleague Alfredo Mederos of the Complutense
University in Madrid spent two years studying ancient texts to work out the
relative values of shekels, talents, minas and other units of weight used in
trade from India to North Africa between 2500 BC and 1000 BC.

To their surprise, they found that it was relatively simple to switch between
the different units they looked at. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very straightforward,鈥�
Lamberg-Karlovsky says. 鈥淭he idea that over vast distances you can have
convertibility indicates the birth of globalisation,鈥� he says.

For instance, the researchers cite the interconvertibility of a 1370-gram
ingot of the decorative stone lapis lazuli. This worked out at 100 Dilmun
shekels from the Indus valley, 160 Mesopotamiam shekels from Babylonia, and 175
Eblaite-Carcemish shekels from Syria.

Alternatively, 15 Dilmun shekels weighed the same as 16 Egyptian dbn.
Amazingly, the Ugarit shekel, the Syrian shekel and the Egyptian kdt each
weighed 9.4 grams.

Such easy conversions allowed trade to flourish in valuable materials such as
tin, copper, gold, silver and lapis lazuli. 鈥淢erchants could easily convert, and
could check they weren鈥檛 being cheated,鈥� says Lamberg-Karlovsky. 鈥淭his has
dramatic implications for the easing of commerce at that time.鈥�