The concept of weighing during the Bronze Age in the Aegean, the Near East and Europe

Abstract

In this paper I am discussing the units of weight and their implications for the Aegean and the Near East in the third millennium BC, in particular with regard to the questions: 1. What objective criteria are there to indicate with certainty that a special group of artefacts are weights? 2. Are there recurring traits in the appearance and actual shaping of weights? Why were certain shapes, materials, surface treatments and so on chosen? 3. Was the concept of weighing invented at one place, and did it spread from there, or are independent inventions at various places possible? 4. Is the concept of weight and weighing connected to a certain degree of development in societies, and to other major changes, like intensive metallurgy, long-distance trade and urbanisation? At the end of this contribution I will turn to evidence for weighing in central Europe during the second millennium BC. In an addendum from from September 2009 a much deeper understanding of the Bronze Age east Mediterranean weight units of 7.83 g, 9.4 g and 11.75 g is reached. The convergence from one unit to the next is based on fractions which have the denominators 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Sixty is the smallest number divisible by every number from 2 to 6. Hence the ratios of the three different units can be expressed as fractions of 60. Through these ratios the actual numbers can be traced backwards: the integers 10, 12 and 15. Important common multiples of 7.83, 9.4 and 11.75 are 47 g (= 60) and multiples of it, especially at 470 g (= 600, the mina) and 28200 g (= 36000, the talent). It seems that the exceptional fractional qualities of the number 60 were fully understood by the middle of the third millennium BCE and therefore 60 was chosen as the basis of this sexagesimal weight metrology.