Still, we owe them something. First of all, we owe them a large debt of gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks ; for think what the world would have been, if the Persians had beaten the Greeks at Marathon, and had enslaved, that means, annihilated^ the genius of ancient Greece. However, this may be called rather an involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity, and I mention it only in order to show, how narrowly, not only Greeks and Romans, but Saxons and Anglo-Saxons too, escaped becoming Parsis or Fire-worshippers.
But I can mention at least one voluntary gift which came to us from Persia, and that is the relation of silver to gold in our bimetallic currency. That relation was, no doubt, first determined in Babylonia, but it assumed its practical and historical importance in the Persian empire, and spread from there to the Greek colonies in Asia, and thence to Europe, where it has maintained itself with slight variation to the present day.
A talent[1] was divided into sixty mince, a mina into sixty shekels. Here we have again the Babylonian sexagesimal system, a system which owes its origin and popularity, I believe, to the fact that sixty has the greatest number of divisors. Shekel was translated into Greek by Stater, and an Athenian gold stater, like the Persian gold stater, down to the times of Croesus, Darius, and Alexander, was the sixtieth part of a mina of gold, not very far therefore from our sovereign. The proportion of silver to gold was fixed as 13 or 13 to 1 ; and if the weight of a
- ↑ See Cunningham, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881, pp. 162-168.
