ce of a fish which is being scraped in front of her.
Exchanging commodities for metal necessitated two or three operations
not required in ordinary barter. The rings or thin bent strips of metal
which formed the "tabnu" and its multiples,* did not always contain the
regulation amount of gold or silver, and were often of light weight.

* The rings of gold in the Museum at Leyden, which were used
as a basis of exchange, are made on the Chaldaeo-Babylonian
pattern, and belong to the Asiatic system.

[Illustration: 118.jpg one of the forms of egyptian scales]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a sketch by Rosellini

They had to be weighed at every fresh transaction in order to estimate
their true value, and the interested parties never missed this excellent
opportunity for a heated discussion: after having declared for a quarter
of an hour that the scales were out of order, that the weighing had been
carelessly performed, and that it should be done over again, they at
last came to terms, exhausted with wrangling, and then went their way
fairly satisfied with one another.* It sometimes happened that a clever
and unscrupulous dealer would alloy the rings, and mix with the precious
metal as much of a baser sort as would be possible without danger of
detection. The honest merchant who thought he was receiving in payment
for some article, say eight tabnu of fine gold, and who had handed to
him eight tabnu of some alloy resembling gold, but containing one-third
of silver, lost in a single transaction, without suspecting it, almost
one-third of his goods. The fear of such counterfeits was instrumental
in restraining the use of tabnu for a long time among the people, and
restricted the buying and selling in the markets to exchange in natural
products or manufactured objects.

* The weighing of rings is often represented on the
monuments from the XVIIIth dynasty onwards. I am not
acquainted with any instance of this on the bas-reliefs of
the Ancient Empire. The giving of false weight is alluded to
in the paragraph in the "Negative Confession," in which the
dead man declares that he has not interfered with the beam
of the scales (cf. vol. i. p. 271) _civili,_ pl. lii. 1. As
to the construction of the Egyptian scales, and the working
of their various parts, see Flinders Petrie's remarks in _A
Season in Egypt_, P- 42, and the drawings which he has
brought toget