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Talent (weight)
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The talent (Latin: talentum, from Ancient Greek: "scale, balance") is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, i.e. one foot cubed. Depending on the length of the respective legal foot, this corresponds roughly to the mass of 27 kg or about 60 English pounds.
The Babylonians and Sumerians had a system in which there were 60 shekels in a mina and 60 minas in a talent.
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The talent (Latin: talentum, from Ancient Greek: "scale, balance") is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, i.e. one foot cubed. Depending on the length of the respective legal foot, this corresponds roughly to the mass of 27 kg or about 60 English pounds.
The Babylonians and Sumerians had a system in which there were 60 shekels in a mina and 60 minas in a talent. This ratio 1:60, talent to mina, was also observed in Ancient Greece where the Attic talent was about 26 kg. The Greek mina is evaluated – depending on sources – to be 434 ± 3 grams. The Ancient Romans also gave the name 'talent' to their weight of 100 libra (pounds — whence the English-system abbreviation lb.). Since the Roman libra is exactly three quarters of the Greek mina, the Roman talent is 1.25 Greek talent.
The monetary talent
As a monetary measure, talent denotes a talent-weight of gold and a talent-weight of silver. The gold talent's weight approximately equals that of a person, some 60 kg (132 lb avoirdupois), yet the silver talent typically weighed only about 33 kg (72.6 lb) varying from 20 kg to 40 kg. These two different weights for gold and silver talents may reflect the different densities of gold and silver: The density of gold is 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, and the density of silver is 10.49 grams per cubic centimeter, making the ratio of densities (gold / silver) = 1.84. The ratio of the weights of gold and silver talents is 60 kg / 33 kg = 1.82, meaning that the gold and silver talents take up about the same volume.
In comparison, a modern "good delivery" bar of silver, traded on world commodities exchanges, weighs 1000 troy ounces which equals 68.57 lb or 31.10 kg, approximately equal to the silver talent weight above. The price of silver is currently US$10.82 per troy ounce which equals US$347.91 per kg (on December 19, 2008).
A modern "good delivery" bar of gold weighs 400 troy ounces which equals 27.43 lb or 12.44 kg, about one-fifth of the 60 kg talent-weight of gold above. The price of gold is currently US$837.90 per troy ounce which equals US$26,942 per kg (on December 19, 2008).
The contemporary value of a talent is difficult to ascertain, because no modern currency is based on fixed weights of gold or silver. When compared with the ancient world, the gross world product of the modern economy has grown much more than the available weight of refined gold and silver. Therefore, a fixed weight of gold or silver today should buy a much larger share of the world's productive output (i.e. should be much more valuable) than in ancient times. At today's prices though, the opposite is true: The weight of all the refined gold in existence (160,000 metric tons of gold), divided into the gross world product of US$66 trillion, yields a value of (US$66 thousand billion)/(5.14 billion troy ounces) = US$12,840/ounce. Yet, the current gold price is only about US$900 per ounce (March 2009), making gold in ancient times worth about 14 times its current value.
Wages are another measure: During the Peloponnesian war in Ancient Greece, a talent was the amount of silver that would pay a month's wages of a trireme crew. At US$10.82 per troy ounce, a 26 kg silver Attic talent is worth US$9,046, and at US$837.90 per troy ounce, a 60 kg gold talent is worth US$1,616,527. Hellenistic mercenaries were commonly paid one drachma per day of military service; a good salary in the post-Alexandrian times. 6,000 silver drachmae constituted a talent, making 1 drachma approximately equal to 1/6 of a modern troy ounce. Based on this fact, assuming a crew of roughly 200 rowers, each rower would receive 30 drachmae or 5 troy ounces of silver per month. Clearly, today it would cost much more than US$9,046 to hire 200 men to crew a ship for a month, so by this measure also, the value of silver in today's economy is much lower than the historic value of silver. If today each crewman was paid at a rate of US$2,500 per month, the total monthly payroll for the ship would be US$500,000, about 55 times the US$9,046 figure, making silver in ancient times worth 55 times its current value.
When we read that King Auletes of Egypt paid Julius Caesar the sum of 6,000, 60 kg talents of gold to grant him the status of a "Friend and Ally of the Roman People," the amount paid, in modern equivalence, was about US$9.7 billion. Later in Roman history, during the medieval Byzantine period, the emperor Basil II was said to have stockpiled the legendary amount of 200,000 talents = 12,000 metric tons of gold, which in modern terms would be worth approximately US$323 billion. This amount of gold compares to the peak accumulation of 20,205 metric tons held in Fort Knox during World War 2. At any rate, Basil II did save enough money that the Byzantine government was able to remit all taxes paid during the final two years of his reign.
The talent as a unit of coinage is mentioned in the New Testament in Jesus's parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), but although it seems to represent a large sum of money, there is nothing in the text to show the exact value intended. This parable is the origin of the sense of the word "talent" meaning "gift or skill" as used in English and other languages. However, it is assumed that the moral of the parable relates to the idea that God cares equally for the "smallest" individuals as he does for the "biggest". There is a similar parable with different details involving the mina (unit) instead of the talent, in Luke 19:12-27. The talent is also used unambiguously in other writings in the Bible, as when describing the material invested in the dwelling of the commandments as received by Moses in .
1 Kings 10:14 (New International Version)
Solomon's Splendor
14 The weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents. (2 Chronicles 9:13)
Footnotes:
1 Kings 10:14 That is, about 40 metric tons, at 60 kg per gold talent
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