On October 28, I stopped by the local library and found an old book for sale, From Red Sea to Blue Nile by a Rosita Forbes, published in 1925. I am a sucker for old travel books, so I looked through it and bought it. I had never heard of Rosita Forbes before, but I looked her up on the Internet, she was quite a lady. The book was about a trip Rosita made in early 1925 through Ethiopia with a photographer named Jones. She calls Ethiopia "Abyssinia", the old name for the country. She mentions "Maria Theresa Dollars" (Thalers) in her book. Of course there were further delays. The coinage of Abyssinia consists of Maria Theresa dollars, 80 per cent. silver, worth approximately three shillings (about seventy-four cents) each, and of an incredible size and weight. A sack containing £50 worth of these was as much as I could lift, and four such bags form a mule load, but, as there is no change in the interior, dollars are of very little use except for a Croesus. You can buy twenty eggs or two chickens for a piastre, and a sheep for three quarter-dollars, but unfortunately all these coins are more or less mythical, and you have to go out int the market with your beautiful shining white dollars, and haggle for piastres and quarters at an inflated value. There is another snare for the unwary. The quarterthaler is stamped with a crowded (sic) lion, but if the beast has his mouth open and a particularly flamboyant twist to his tail, the tribesman will not accept him, so Jones and I spent weary hours bargaining for neat quiet lions, with shut mouths and slinky tails. At last we came back, burdened with small sacks, dumped them into a suit-case with a sigh of relief and attempted to lift it into a corner. Both handles broke at once. We sat down on the floor and looked at each other mutely.... The Ethiopian money then was 16 piastres or girsh to the dollar. Maria Theresa Thalers weigh around 28 grams. The weight of the £50 sack she mentions would be around 9.36 kg or 20.6 lbs. After a while, the group heads to the province of Gojam (now Gojjam): Even the money of Addis Ababa is not current in this western province and we were obliged to exchange all our piastres, lions open-mouthed or shut, legless or curly-tailed, for bars of salt. These are about fourteen inches long and two inches thick and wide. Six of them can be obtained for a dollar, each carefully wrapped in cane fiber, and these constitute a porter's load on the march, so a man is paid about $10 a month for the sole purpose of carrying seventy-five cents. Later she notes that: There is no general currency. Menelik dollars are rarely accepted, piastres are only good in the South. Cartridges of two different kinds, bars of salt, ear studs, oil, incense, kohl, white cotton stuff, medicines, are all coin of the realm, according to the position and need of the district. These are "Menelik dollars", called Birrs or Talaris (Thalers): The design of the quarter-thalers is the same, but smaller. Here is an Ethiopian Birr with a "neat quiet lion": Ethiopia Birr or Talari (Dollar) EE 1889 (AD 1897) Here is a later one whose lion has a "flamboyant twist" to his tail: Ethiopia Birr or Talari (Dollar) EE 1895 (AD 1903) And here's the old girl, herself, the Maria Theresa Thaler:
Great story willieboyd. What a hardship that must have been, if for no other reason than figuring out what was acceptable as money. Thanks for the interesting thread. Bruce
