Compute ancient trade values in shekel, mina & talent — the weight/currency system of Babylon & Assyria
Select a tab for your task: Unit Converter converts any amount between grains, shekels, minas, and talents; Exchange Rates converts commodities like barley, wool, or lapis lazuli into their silver shekel equivalent using historically attested Old Babylonian price data; Trade Ledger lets you build a multi-item transaction record and see the total value in silver units — just as a Babylonian scribe would have inscribed on a clay tablet.
Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — gave us humanity's first writing system around 3200 BCE, and its primary purpose was accounting. The earliest cuneiform tablets aren't poetry; they're receipts, ration lists, and debt records. The weight-based currency system of grains, shekels, minas, and talents governed trade from Sumer through the Akkadian Empire, Old Babylonian period (~1900–1600 BCE), Assyrian merchant colonies in Anatolia (the famous kārum Kanesh), and beyond.
Understanding these units matters for historians, archaeology students, anyone playing historical games, writers crafting Bronze Age fiction, and educators teaching ancient economics. A single talent of silver (~30 kg, 3,600 shekels) could fund a small army for months. A laborer earned roughly 10 shekels per month. One shekel of silver could buy about 300 litres of barley in a good year — numbers that become vivid when you run them through a calculator.
The exchange rates here draw from cuneiform tablet evidence: Hammurabi's Law Code, Old Babylonian administrative texts, and the Kültepe merchant archives. They're approximate averages; ancient markets fluctuated just like modern ones.
The weight system was sexagesimal (base-60) throughout:
To convert a commodity quantity to silver: Silver shekels = Commodity amount ÷ Exchange rate. All units are normalized to base sila (volume) or mina (weight) before division.
In the Old Babylonian period (~1800 BCE), 1 shekel of silver (≈8.33g) could buy roughly 300 litres of barley — enough to feed one person for several months. A skilled craftsman or soldier earned about 10 shekels per month. Think of 1 shekel as roughly equivalent to a week's wages for an average worker.
Yes, the Hebrew shekel (שֶׁקֶל) derives directly from the Mesopotamian gin₂, sharing the same root meaning "to weigh." The Biblical 50-shekel silver price for a slave in Leviticus 27:3 aligns with Old Babylonian slave prices documented in cuneiform contracts. The weight standards varied slightly by region and period, but were broadly comparable.
The grain (Sumerian: še, also transliterated as "she") was the smallest weight unit, originally based on a single grain of barley. 180 grains = 1 shekel, making 1 grain ≈ 0.046 grams. Grains appear mostly in pharmaceutical and precision metalworking contexts. Most everyday trade was conducted in shekels and minas.
The rates are based on published scholarship of cuneiform administrative texts, primarily from Ur III and Old Babylonian archives (roughly 2100–1600 BCE). They represent typical prices, not fixed official rates — actual transactions in the tablets show considerable variation of ±30–50% depending on season, location, and political conditions. Use them for educational modeling and historical fiction research, not precise academic citation without checking primary sources.