192 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MONEY—DAVIDSON. 
cattle as forming the principal item in their wealth. And 
although every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians 
(Genesis, c. 46, v. 34), as Joseph instructed his brethren, yet the 
Egyptians worshipped their great divinity Apis under the form 
of a bull, and worshipped also a sacred ram ; customs which pro- 
bab!y show that at some time or other their ancestors, whether 
in the northern Soudan or in Asia, and still in the pastoral stage, 
had regarded with proper veneration the cattle and the sheep 
which constituted their wealth. 
The earliest literatures both of Aryans and of Semites show 
that cattle were wealth, and the measure of wealth and the 
medium of exchange. The wealth of the Patriarchs was meas- 
ured by their flocks and herds, and we need only refer, in the 
almost equally familiar stories in Homer, to the one-sided 
exchange between Glaucon and Diomede “of golden arms for 
brazen, those worth one hundred oxen for those worth nine.” 
When history opens, most of the nations which afterwards 
played leading parts were still in the pastoral stage. Egypt 
had already passed beyond it, and the Greeks were making 
the transition to the agricultural and settled conditions 
of life. And as each nation first demands our notice whether 
in the Mediterranean region, in northern Europe, or in Central 
Asia, it is almost always the same picture that is presented of a 
pastoral people whose wealth consists in flocks and herds. And 
not only have we a priori reason to suppose that the chief item 
of their wealth formed their rudimentary medium of exchange; 
but we know from literature and from archeology that the ox 
was their unit of value. We have scales of value preserved to 
us in the Sacred Books of the East; and of these scales we 
have what might be almost exact transcripts among the semi- 
civilized tribes of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and of Northern 
and Southern Africa at the present day. The earliest coins of 
Greece which have been discovered are stamped with the head 
of an ox; and the legal code of Draco retains with true legal 
conservatism the otherwise obsolete practice of expressing values 
in terms of oxen. Indeed there is more than probability, there 
