This small weight is fashioned from hematite, a dense iron-oxide mineral prized in antiquity precisely because its hardness and uniform density made it resistant to wear and fraudulent shaving. It originates from Cyprus and is dated broadly to the 3rd–1st millennium BC, placing it within a timespan that encompasses the Bronze Age through the early Iron Age in the eastern Mediterranean. The piece entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Cesnola Collection, assembled by Luigi Palma di Cesnola during his tenure as American consul on Cyprus and purchased by the museum through public subscription between 1874 and 1876. Standardized weights were foundational to commerce across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Merchants, traders, and royal administrators relied on calibrated stone and metal weights to measure commodities such as grain, silver, and oil against agreed units — shekels, minas, and talents in the Semitic world; staters and drachms in the Aegean sphere. Hematite's near-constant density made it a preferred material for precision weights throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Cyprus. The biblical record intersects this practice directly and critically. Leviticus 19:35–36 and Deuteronomy 25:13–15 command Israel to maintain honest weights and measures, framing commercial integrity as a covenantal obligation to YHWH. Proverbs 11:1 and 20:10 reinforce the same ethic, declaring that dishonest weights are an abomination. The prophets Amos (8:5) and Micah (6:11) condemn the manipulation of weights as a concrete social injustice. Artifacts of this class thus provide tangible material context for a recurring biblical concern — not proof of specific events, but evidence of the commercial infrastructure those texts presuppose. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession, Cesnola Collection); Raz Kletter, *Economic Keystones: The Weight System of the Kingdom of Judah* (JSOT Supplement, 1998); Marvin Powell, 'Weights and Measures,' *Anchor Bible Dictionary* (1992).
Hematite weights from the ancient eastern Mediterranean provide direct material context for the biblical system of commercial weights — shekels, minas, and talents — and for the repeated prophetic and legal demands, from Leviticus through Amos and Micah, that Israel maintain honest measures as an expression of covenant faithfulness. This example attests the widespread, long-lived use of precision weighing technology across the very cultural sphere in which Israel's economy and its scriptural ethics were embedded.