a row of cowries for his little pots:  “You have merely to take a few drops of this to see how delicious it is,” he urges in a persuasive tone.  A seated customer has two jars thrust under his nose by a woman—­they probably contain some kind of unguent:  “Here is something which smells good enough to tempt you.”  Behind this group two men are discussing the relative merits of a bracelet and a bundle of fish-hooks; a woman, with a small box in her hand, is having an argument with a merchant selling necklaces; another woman seeks to obtain a reduction in the price 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 together on pl. xx. of the same work.

[Illustration:  118b.jpg SCENES IN A BAZAAR]