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. The study 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.