GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY—According to a Science Magazine report, Bronze Age merchants in Mesopotamia or Egypt developed the standardized system of weights that eventually spread across Europe through repeated contacts and comparisons. It had been previously thought that this system of weights was established by a ruler or religious authority and then adopted by merchants. Raphael Hermann, Lorenz Rahmstorf, and Nicola Ialongo of Georg August University analyzed weights unearthed at sites in Europe, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, and found that more than 2,000 of them weighed roughly the same amount—a unit comprising less than half an ounce with a deviation of about five percent among the weights in the sample. The researchers then carved 100 weights from stone, modeling each one on a randomly chosen weight that had already been produced. This practice produced weights that varied from each other by about five percent when weighed on replica Bronze Age balance scales. The researchers explained that if the weights had been copied from a standard produced by an authority, the deviations between them would have been much smaller. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. To read the dramatic story of a Bronze Age merchant city in Syria, go to "The Ugarit Archives."
