ABSTRACT
In the time of the earliest records in Egypt, silver was more valuable than gold, while in about 2000 b . c . in Babylon gold was about six times as valuable as silver. But for some thousand years down to the 5th century b . c . gold was, in the Eastern Mediterranean and throughout Asia and Egypt, about thirteen times as valuable as silver. In Assyria some twenty private contracts of the 9th to the 7th centuries b . c . have been found, in which sums are expressed in silver, but were paid in gold at about this ratio.1 In Nineveh and Babylon, too, this ratio has been established. At this ratio a mixture of three parts of gold and one part of silver would give an electrum worth ten times as much as silver. The difficulty of assaying early coins has given rise to a suggestion that early electrum coins were accepted at a conventional value of ten times their weight in silver.2 But the early series of electrum issues petered out in the 6th century, and if ever a conven tional value was attached to electrum it had disappeared by the end of the 6th century b . c .
