Illustration Query - 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
From The Observatory
Query: 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
Illustration Query
Quoted text:
3.6 Guitel[1] 1975: sign for silver, like barley.
There is no indication where in the chapter body this could go. What do you think about where Illustration 3.6 belongs? Some ideas include:
- “Indeed, public accountants designed their barley measures and silver weights…”
- “At first the large public institutions functioned mainly on a barley standard, at least for their internal bookkeeping:…”
- “‘…The normal expression in them is kubi - “its silver value,” referring to the total price of a stated amount of a commodity.’”[2]
- “Mesopotamian rulers administered prices for the major commodities, above all the barley/silver parity.”
- “Silver weights were denominated in the same proportions as volumetric barley measures, and into this system were plugged the most important prices and interest rates.”
- “In time, silver came to be weighed out as a monetary equivalence to the value of barley and other essentials.”
- “These product flows were not yet evaluated in terms of common monetary copper or silver prices, …”
- “Here for the first time is found a fixed parity between silver and barley (and other prices).”
- “Official prices for major public services and commodities were inscribed by the Ur III ruler Shulgi c. 2100 BC…”
- “Paragraph 89 of Hammurapi’s laws made a gur of barley equivalent in value to a silver shekel. …”
- “Powell (1977) noted that the Middle Babylonian word for 1/8 shekel, bitqu (literally ‘cutting’), …”
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