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- 

 bably 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 stones 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 archaeology 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 



