• A New Look at Old World MoneyFor more than a century, archaeological excavations have uncovered evidence that ancient Bronze Age civilizations 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 1000 B.C.— how did the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and more obscure city-states trade without standardized systems of weights and measures? "Commerce was long thought to have been a chaotic affair, a sort of Tower of Babel of markets," says Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, an archaeologist at Harvard University.
Last May, Lamberg-Karlovsky and Alfredo Mederos of the University of Madrid 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. "We didn't find any overall formula, any 'e=mc^2' to explain everything," says Lamberg-Karlovsky. "What we ended up with was something more like a Bronze Age euro—in which a series of simple calculations could be used to convert one system into another."
With the help of ancient texts, the two sat down and figured out the math. Working with a hypothetical three-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 operation were elegant in their simplicity," Lamberg-Karlovsky says, "and would have been crucial in developing the scale and nature of commercial exchange 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," he says. — Curtis Rist
