Mina (Unit)

The mina was a unit of weight and of account used across the ancient Near East and the Greek world. In the Greek system one mina equalled 100 drachmas, and 60 minas made a talent. It was a reckoning unit rather than a coin: Greek states did not regularly strike a one-mina piece, but prices, loans, fines and dowries were frequently stated in minas.

The Greek word mna was borrowed from a Semitic source; the Akkadian equivalent is manû. The same unit underlies the Hebrew and Aramaic maneh, and the word "mene" in the biblical writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel is generally read as a reference to it.

The mina is far older than coinage. Mesopotamian scribes were using it by the 3rd millennium BCE as part of a weight system based on sixties: 60 shekels to the mina and 60 minas to the talent. Weighed silver served as a means of payment and a measure of value long before the first coins appeared, and temple and palace records priced grain, land and labour in shekels and minas of silver. Weights varied between cities and periods, but a Mesopotamian mina is usually estimated at roughly half a kilogram.

When coinage spread to Greece in the 6th century BCE, the mina was adapted to a decimal division: 100 drachmas rather than 60 shekels, with each drachma divided into six obols. On the Attic standard used by Athens, with a drachm of about 4.3 g, a mina of coined silver corresponded to roughly 430 g. Other standards, such as the heavier Aeginetan system, produced correspondingly heavier minas. Ancient writers also mention commercial minas for weighing goods that differed somewhat from the coin standard, so figures quoted in the sources are not always interchangeable.

Ancient tradition credits the Athenian lawgiver Solon with reforming weights and measures in the early 6th century BCE, possibly adjusting the relationship between the mina and the drachma. The details of these reforms are uncertain, and most scholars now date the first Athenian coins somewhat after Solon.

The mina was the convenient unit of account for middling sums, too large to quote in drachmas and too small for talents. Athenian speeches and inscriptions record loans, property values and fines in minas, and a mina was a common figure for the ransom or sale price of a person. Late 5th-century building accounts from Athens suggest that a skilled worker earned around a drachma a day, so a mina represented very roughly a hundred days' work at that time, although wages and prices changed considerably over the classical and Hellenistic periods.

Payment was made in coin, typically silver tetradrachms, and the mina served to total them. In this sense it functioned much like later moneys of account, which named a value without needing a matching coin to exist.

Although the mina was not a regular denomination, some large coins were tied to it. In Ptolemaic Egypt, large gold octadrachms issued in the 3rd century BCE are generally identified with the term mnaieion found in papyri, since their value was reckoned at about a mina of silver. In the Hellenistic kingdoms and later under Rome, accounts continued to use minas alongside drachmas and the Roman denarius, and the term persisted in Greek and Jewish texts, including the Gospel parable in which servants are entrusted with minas.

The mina illustrates the long continuity between weighed-silver economies and coined money. A system created for pre-coinage exchange and temple accounting survived the invention of coins and was simply re-divided to suit them. Together with the talent, the drachma and the obol, it formed a ladder of values that let Greek states and individuals express sums of any size, a function that money of account still serves in modern monetary systems.

• American Numismatic Society
• British Museum collection