Sodak
Paha Sapa Papa
This short article appears in the last Discover magazine:
For more than a century, archaeological excavations have uncovered evidence that ancient bronze age civs carried on long-distance trading of tin, copper, lapis lazuli, and gold. But a mystery has endured: In the years before currencies developed - roughly 2500 to 1000bc - how did the civs trade without standardized systems of weights and measures?
...
Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky and Alfredo Mederos ... answered the question by showing a way in which the 10 most significant systems of weights used in the region could be converted from one to another.
...
With the help of ancient texts, they sat down and figured out the math. Working with a hypothetical 3-pound chunk of lapis lazuli, the bronze age equivalent of diamonds, the researchers calculated that it weighed roughly the same as 100 Dilmun shekels, 160 mesopotamian shekels, and 175 Eblaite-Carchemish shekels. "The conversion systems in operations were elegant in their simplicity," L-K says, "and would have been crucial in developing the scale and nature of commercial exhcange in the near east." More important is the implication that conversions were workable. "The bronze age economies were far more sophisticated than we previously believed."
Any thoughts?
For more than a century, archaeological excavations have uncovered evidence that ancient bronze age civs carried on long-distance trading of tin, copper, lapis lazuli, and gold. But a mystery has endured: In the years before currencies developed - roughly 2500 to 1000bc - how did the civs trade without standardized systems of weights and measures?
...
Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky and Alfredo Mederos ... answered the question by showing a way in which the 10 most significant systems of weights used in the region could be converted from one to another.
...
With the help of ancient texts, they sat down and figured out the math. Working with a hypothetical 3-pound chunk of lapis lazuli, the bronze age equivalent of diamonds, the researchers calculated that it weighed roughly the same as 100 Dilmun shekels, 160 mesopotamian shekels, and 175 Eblaite-Carchemish shekels. "The conversion systems in operations were elegant in their simplicity," L-K says, "and would have been crucial in developing the scale and nature of commercial exhcange in the near east." More important is the implication that conversions were workable. "The bronze age economies were far more sophisticated than we previously believed."
Any thoughts?
