Old Babylonian silver shekel reckoning
Silver shekels served as a measure of obligations in Old Babylonian law, long before the appearance of coinage.
- Dates in use
- Beginning and ending uncertain
- Where
- Old Babylonian Mesopotamia
- Form of reckoning
- Amounts of silver, not a shekel coin
- Ancestry branch
- See family connections
Its place in the family
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Earlier ancestry is not established here.
Old Babylonian silver shekel reckoning
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No successor is established here.
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Old Babylonian silver shekel reckoning
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The story
The legal collection associated with Hammurabi sets payments in silver shekels. Physician fees of 10, 5 or 2 shekels applied to specified cases, while other provisions set compensation for divorce. These are accounts of what was owed, rather than descriptions of minted coins. [1]
The collection is dated to about 1750 BC under the middle chronology used by Roth. That dates the surviving legal evidence; it does not tell us when shekel reckoning began or ended. A later successor to this particular account tradition has not yet been established in the atlas. [1]
Sources and evidence
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Cite this page
“Old Babylonian silver shekel reckoning.” The Family Tree of Money. © Field Technologies, Inc. Reader edition 2026-10-13; research dataset v44. https://familytreeofmoney.org/currency/CUR-V26-OLD-BABYLONIAN-SILVER.html