Debt in the Scales: Mechanics and Metaphor in the ancient Mediterranean

There are two histories of the scales in the ancient Mediterranean, leading parallel lives in scholarship: one on the physical scales of commerce as a technical instrument, and another on the metaphorical scales of justice as expressive of the idea of equilibrium. Instead of confirming this division and abiding by a separation of idea and artefact, this article takes the instrument of the scales and the idea of equilibrium in antiquity as an example of their inextricability. To demonstrate this unity, the extant evidence on the implement of the scales is examined as it appears in the archaeological and textual record of the ancient Mediterranean from the third millennium BCE to the first millennium CE, in close conjunction with conceptions of justice, debt, and imbalance. Beginning in ancient Greece, and from there retracing some of the peregrinations of an instrument across the ancient Mediterranean towards the Ancient Near East, ancient Egypt, Israel, and Rome, the analysis herein suggests that the pervasive idea of debt and injustice as imbalance cannot be separated from the presence of a peripatetic and rather prosaic technological tool. A simultaneous examination of both can uncover the scales’ cross-cultural import, which resides in its close connection to a worldview it has helped to produce: able to render dissimilar things equivalent, the balance makes all objects potentially exchangeable.