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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;willieboyd2, post: 1811305, member: 4910&quot;]On October 28, I stopped by the local library and found an old book for sale,</p><p><i>From Red Sea to Blue Nile</i> by a Rosita Forbes, published in 1925.</p><p><br /></p><p>I am a sucker for old travel books, so I looked through it and bought it.</p><p>I had never heard of Rosita Forbes before, but I looked her up on the Internet,</p><p>she was quite a lady.</p><p><br /></p><p>The book was about a trip Rosita made in early 1925 through Ethiopia with a</p><p>photographer named Jones.</p><p>She calls Ethiopia &quot;Abyssinia&quot;, the old name for the country.</p><p><br /></p><p>She mentions &quot;Maria Theresa Dollars&quot; (Thalers) in her book.</p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>Of course there were further delays. The coinage of Abyssinia consists of</p><p>Maria Theresa dollars, 80 per cent. silver, worth approximately three shillings</p><p>(about seventy-four cents) each, and of an incredible size and weight.</p><p>A sack containing £50 worth of these was as much as I could lift, and four such</p><p>bags form a mule load, but, as there is no change in the interior, dollars are</p><p>of very little use except for a Croesus. You can buy twenty eggs or two chickens</p><p>for a piastre, and a sheep for three quarter-dollars, but unfortunately all these</p><p>coins are more or less mythical, and you have to go out int the market with your</p><p>beautiful shining white dollars, and haggle for piastres and quarters at an</p><p>inflated value.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is another snare for the unwary. The quarterthaler is stamped with a</p><p>crowded (sic) lion, but if the beast has his mouth open and a particularly</p><p>flamboyant twist to his tail, the tribesman will not accept him, so Jones and</p><p>I spent weary hours bargaining for neat quiet lions, with shut mouths and</p><p>slinky tails. At last we came back, burdened with small sacks, dumped them into a</p><p>suit-case with a sigh of relief and attempted to lift it into a corner. Both</p><p>handles broke at once. We sat down on the floor and looked at each other mutely....</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>The Ethiopian money then was 16 piastres or girsh to the dollar.</p><p>Maria Theresa Thalers weigh around 28 grams.</p><p>The weight of the £50 sack she mentions would be around 9.36 kg or 20.6 lbs.</p><p><br /></p><p>After a while, the group heads to the province of Gojam (now Gojjam):</p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>Even the money of Addis Ababa is not current in this western province and we were</p><p>obliged to exchange all our piastres, lions open-mouthed or shut, legless or</p><p>curly-tailed, for bars of salt. These are about fourteen inches long and two inches</p><p>thick and wide. Six of them can be obtained for a dollar, each carefully wrapped</p><p>in cane fiber, and these constitute a porter&#039;s load on the march, so a man is paid</p><p>about $10 a month for the sole purpose of carrying seventy-five cents.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>Later she notes that:</p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>There is no general currency. Menelik dollars are rarely accepted, piastres are</p><p>only good in the South. Cartridges of two different kinds, bars of salt, ear studs,</p><p>oil, incense, kohl, white cotton stuff, medicines, are all coin of the realm,</p><p>according to the position and need of the district.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>These are &quot;Menelik dollars&quot;, called Birrs or Talaris (Thalers):</p><p>The design of the quarter-thalers is the same, but smaller.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is an Ethiopian Birr with a &quot;neat quiet lion&quot;:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.brianrxm.com/posts/post_ethiopia_b01_1889.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p>Ethiopia Birr or Talari (Dollar) EE 1889 (AD 1897)</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a later one whose lion has a &quot;flamboyant twist&quot; to his tail:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.brianrxm.com/posts/post_ethiopia_b01_1895.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p>Ethiopia Birr or Talari (Dollar) EE 1895 (AD 1903)</p><p><br /></p><p>And here&#039;s the old girl, herself, the Maria Theresa Thaler:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://www.brianrxm.com/posts/post_maria_theresa_thaler_reg.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p><img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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