“The Sumerian unit of weight — the mina — is the oldest standardized measure of value in recorded human history, the foundation on which Mesopotamian commerce, law, and the concept of monetary weight itself was built.”
The mina (Sumerian: ma-na; Akkadian: manû) was the foundational unit of the Mesopotamian weight system, equal to approximately 500 grams (though regional standards varied). It was divided into 60 shekels and collected into talents (60 minas = 1 talent), making it the middle unit of the sexagesimal (base-60) weight hierarchy that Sumerian mathematicians and merchants developed before 2500 BCE. The earliest written records of the mina come from the great administrative centers of Sumer — Uruk, Lagash, Nippur — where clay tablets recording grain rations, silver payments, and commodity inventories use the ma-na as a standard reference point. The mina was not merely a weight: it was a conceptual anchoring of value, the unit that made large-scale trade, taxation, and legal compensation possible across the vastly diverse Mesopotamian economic world.
The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) states penalties in minas of silver throughout: a physician who caused a patient's death owed five minas; a stolen ox was worth to be compensated at five minas. The mina appears in Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece (as ma-na), in the Hebrew Bible as the maneh (מָנֶה), in Egyptian New Kingdom records, and in Ugaritic commercial texts from the Syrian coast. By the first millennium BCE, the mina was a pan-Near Eastern standard. When the Bible refers to the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of Daniel 5:25 — the divine handwriting on Belshazzar's palace wall — the first word mene is the Aramaic form of mina: 'numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided.' The last reckoning of the Babylonian kingdom was pronounced in its own currency unit.
The Greek form mnā (μνᾶ) or mna entered Greek from Semitic trade contact, and the New Testament parable of the ten minas (Luke 19:11–27) uses this word for the coins distributed by the departing nobleman. Latin rendered it mina or mna. The English word 'mina' or 'maneh' appears in Bible translations from the 16th century onward — William Tyndale and subsequent translators borrowed the word from the Greek and Hebrew originals. The related term 'shekel' (already taken in this database) traveled the same linguistic road: the shekel was 1/60th of a mina, and both words moved from Sumerian accounting tablets to biblical text to English usage.
The mina left its mark on English in less obvious ways. The English word 'money' derives from Latin moneta (the mint, named from the temple of Juno Moneta in Rome), not from mina — but the concept of a standardized weight-based monetary unit that 'money' represents was developed in Mesopotamia, and the mina was its first clear instance. The talent — the New Testament's word for an innate gift or capability (from the parable of the talents, Matthew 25:14–30) — was also a Mesopotamian weight unit, the 60-mina weight, before it became a metaphor for human capacity. The Sumerian weight system shaped the vocabulary of value in Western civilization at every level, from the literal to the metaphorical.
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Today
The mina is one of the oldest technical terms in human intellectual history — a unit of measurement invented by Sumerian accountants before the invention of writing itself, then recorded in writing, then transmitted through Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into the vocabulary of the entire Western world.
The word's greatest legacy is invisible: the sexagesimal system in which the mina was embedded (60 shekels to the mina, 60 minas to the talent) is the reason we still divide hours into 60 minutes and minutes into 60 seconds, and circles into 360 degrees. The Sumerian weight system's base-60 arithmetic became the arithmetic of time and angle for all subsequent civilizations. The mina itself fell out of use, but the counting system it embodied never has.
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