In the ancient world, many units of measurement were based,
approximately, on some parts of the human body: arm, cubit, span, inch,
foot; or on their functions: pace, half hour, league.... I wondered if
there might be some parts of the body, which weighed 4.25g: in other
words, half a siqlum or half a giĝ. And I identified, albeit with wide
variations, these parts in the foreskin which Abraham/Hammurabi cuts off
as a symbol of a new faith, reviving -I cannot say how consciously - an
ancient, now forgotten tradition which stands at the base of that
antique unit of measurement with an abstract value and the form of a
Ring to be worn as a bracelet or anklet on or in one's own body (eg.
nose rings, called nezem in Hebrew, and still in use as ornaments in
many populations, in India for example; and earrings). These rings would
therefore have had a weight and a composition of precious material
equivalent to a coin. Such coin could be connected to the Pukku, ring,
belonged to Gilgamesh, which could have been the non-Indoeuropean root
PKK from which Benveniste derived the word Pecunia (money), as being
therefore much older than the term Pecus (herd, flock). In my work, this
is the origin of the coin: round, empty, portable, also deriving from
the discarded foreskin, thereby generating symbolic rings long before
the Lydia of Croesus. It certainly does not arise from a non-existent
god of the underworld who would defecate gold: in other words, that so
often cited Mammon who has persecuted us for 2,000 years.
