Talent (measurement)

The talent (Ancient Greek: τάλαντον, talanton, Latin talentum) was a unit of weight used in the ancient world, often used for weighing gold and silver, but also mentioned in connection with other metals, ivory, and frankincense. In Homer's poems, it is always used of gold and is thought to have been quite a small weight of about , approximately the same as the later gold stater coin or Persian daric. In later times in Greece, it represented a much larger weight, approximately 3000 times as much: an Attic talent was approximately . The word also came to be used as the equivalent of the middle eastern kakkaru or kikkar. A Babylonian talent was . Ancient Israel adopted the Babylonian weight talent, but later revised it. The heavy common talent, used in New Testament times, was . A Roman talent (divided into 100 librae or pounds) was Attic talents, approximately . An Egyptian talent was 80 librae, approximately . The Akkadian talent was called kakkaru in the Akkadian language, corresponding to Biblical Hebrew kikkar כִּכָּר (translated as Greek τάλαντον 'talanton' in the Septuagint, English 'talent'), Ugaritic kkr (𐎋𐎋𐎗), Phoenician kkr (𐤒𐤒𐤓), Syriac kakra (ܟܲܟܪܵܐ), and apparently to gaggaru in the Amarna Tablets. The name comes from the Semitic root KKR meaning 'to be circular', referring to round masses of gold or silver. The kakkaru or talent weight was introduced in Mesopotamia at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and was normalized at the end of the 3rd millennium during the Akkadian-Sumer phase. The talent was divided into 60 minas, each of which was subdivided into 60 shekels (following the common Mesopotamian sexagesimal number system). These weights were used subsequently by the Babylonians, Sumerians and Phoenicians, and later by the Hebrews. The Babylonian weights are approximately: shekel (), mina () and talent (). The Greeks adopted these weights through their trade with the Phoenicians along with the ratio of 60 minas to one talent.