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If you have ever listened to gold and jewelry news, you should be familiar with terms like gold quote, gold price today or gold price per gram and per mithqal. We normally take advantage of units when buying or selling things and you have probably their names frequently. But when talking about buying or selling gold, we use units that are a bit more specific. With regard to the price of gold, people normally buy gold in small amounts and as a result don’t use units like kilogram. Instead, gram or mithqal are heard more often.
With regard to the necessity of accuracy in buying and selling gold, these units are minimized to the smallest possible amount so that neither the side will face a financial loss. The units that are normally used for buying gold are as follows:
Milligram
Gram
Mithqal
Ounce
Milligram is the smallest and Ounce is the largest unit used for buying and selling gold. Each of these units are different from the other, which will be discussed in the following.
How Many Milligrams Are There in Each Gram?
One of the units that you may have heard frequently when buying gold, is milligram. Milligram is the smallest measuring unit for gold and there are no smaller units than this . With regard to the name of this unit, you may easily guess that every gram equals 1000 milligrams.
Though milligram is a very small unit, gradually and at every increase in gold price, every milligram may worth a good deal of money so it can be sure said that every milligram matters. As a result when buying a piece of gold, the weight of the piece will be calculated with accurate scales, applying gold calculation formula.
Let’s have a simple example. Let’s imagine you have chosen piece of gold weighing 4/608 grams. The number clearly shows that the weight of this piece is less than 5 grams. But how should one read this number?! The number is shown in the form of a four-digit decimal number. Thus the weight of this piece can be read as 4 grams and 608 milligrams.
Gold in Grams
Gram can be considered the most famous weight unit for evaluating gold weight which is not used exclusively for gold. It was already mentioned that every gram equals 1000 milligrams. Gram is actually a frequently-used unit and can be applied for many things, from edibles to gold and jewelry. This unit is most frequently used for weighing gold in every purchase, which is mainly because people know gram better than other measurement units.
Gold in Mithqal
The measurement unit which is larger than gram, is called mithqal and is not only used for measuring gold, but also for weighing foodstuff, herbal medicines, and many other tiny stuff. In far past, mithqal and Dinar were the only measuring units and people’s transactions were done based on these two units.
In gold and jewelry market the word “mithqal” is heard frequenly. However, in contrast to Iran, that both “mazane” and “mithqal ” words are used interchangeably, in Arab countries around the Persian Gulf, it is only used as a synonym for the word “guess”
Yet, taking into account that mithqal is less frequently used in comparison to gram, we will take a close look at the relationship between gram and mithqal.
In the following, we will also discuss different types of mithqal and also two main differences between gram and mithqal.
Two differences between gold gram and mithqal
It was already mentioned that gram is a smaller unit co,pared to mithqal. There are two responses for the question how many grams there are in a mithqal of gold. The main reason to this difference lies in the existence of two different types of mithqal that have different uses.
The two types of mithqal are:
Seyrafi Mithqal
Religious Mithqal
With regard to the fact that in gold and jewelry deals, they normally deal with Seyrafi mithqal, we will take a close look at the difference between these two units.
Seyrafi Mithqal
Seyrafi mithqal which is also known as Mazane, equals 4/608 grams or 24 chickpeas. You may wonder why chickpeas are used for evaluation. The answer is simple. In the far past, there were neither digital scales nor mechanical ones. According to their calculations, every chickpea equaled 192 milligrams.
In some cases to weigh goods which were not as precious as gold, the rate 4/608 was rounded to 5 grams. However, as it was already mentioned, since gold is a precious metal, even every milligram counts when you plan to buy or sell.
Shari’i (Religious) Mithqal
Each Shari’i mithqal stands for 3/456 grams and equals 18 chickpeas. With regard to the different application of this type of mithqal which is normally for religious purposes such as Khums and Zakat, every religious mithqal is considered equal to 72 wheat grains.
It was so far mentioned that Seyrafi mithqal is used for measuring gold and jewelry and it equals 4/6083 grams. But if you place a mithqal of gold on the scale, you won’t see this number on the LCD. Here’s the second difference between mithqal and gram.
The Difference between Gold Gram and Mithqal Karat
Every mithqal of gold has a karat of 17 and a purity level of 705. This is while we mean 18 Karat gold when talking about gram which has a purity level of 750. In order to convert a mithqal of 17 Karat gold to equal grams of 18 Karat gold, you should multiply 4/6083 times 705 and divide it by 750. This way, we will find the weight of one gram of 18 Karat gold. The result will be 4/331802.
But to find the price of one gram of 18 karat gold, we need to divide the price of gold by 4/13318. The question that might engage you is whether salespeople do the same calculations or not. The answert is negative. In order to change the unit of one mithqal of 17 Karat gold to grams of 18 karat gold, you only need to divide per mithqal price by 4/3318
A History of Gold Mithqal
In the far past, mitqal and Dinar were the only measurement units. At that time, every mithqal was equal to 4/55 grams which was the same as 1/33 Dirhams, 24 Karat or 96 chickpeas. However, the amount changed gradually and during Abdulmalik-ibn-Marvan some improvements took place in coinage system and the coin weight reached 4/25 grams.
As a result, every mithqal became equal to ten seventh of a Dirham, 20 Karats or 60 chickpeas. In religious context the mithqal-Dirham ratio is 10 to 7. However, the ratio is considered as 3 to 2.
Among other measurement units which is still of-use and trustable, one can name the Umayyad ratl, which was a unit for measuring liquids. Another available sample is the one-karat glass-stone which refers to the Abbasi era of Egypt. These two samples were mass measurement units and according to them, every mithqal was equal to 4/608 grams and every Dirham was the same as 3/125 grams.
Every Karat is considered 1/24 mithqal which was the same as 200 milligrams. Afterwards that period, every 5 Karats were similar to 1 gram. During this period, every mithqal was considered similar to 18 chickpeas and every 4 chickpeas equaled 1 gram.
Now, let’s take a look at the common currency units of that time. You might have heard the two words of Dirham and Dinar together. Dirham had been a coin, used as the local currency in Iran and nine other countries in the far past, Every Dinar was similar to one Seyrafi mithqal in terms of mass which equals 4/6083 grams according to previous parts of this article.
The coin consisted of gold, silver and copper and the amount of gold used in that coin was 3/456 grams. The amount gold used in these coins was always the same but the silver-copper ratio had not been always the same. It can be said that every Dinar was equal to one Seyrafi mithqal in terms of weight but the amount of gold used in it was as much as a Shari’i mithqal.
Units such as «kharwar, mithqal and quintal/centner » were used over years for weighing and transactions. Finally, Iran joined the metric system in 1311 and afterwards deals and transactions were done in grams and kilograms. There were struggles over the real amount of some measurement units such as quintal/centner , but joining the metric system put an end to all of them. People, however, used substandard scales and weighing weights even years after this law was passed.
Ounce
In previous EG articles, the concept of Ounce was widely discussed and e provided you with useful information in this regard. Ounce is written as «oz» in summary and corresponds 31/103 grams which equals about 7 mithqals.
Conclusion
In this article we discussed the concept of gold mithqal and pointing out two main differences between ounce and gram, we mentioned that how many grams there are in every mithqal. Next, we discussed different gold measurement units and mentioned the difference between them. In this table,measurement units are mentioned in summary. If you wish to have the expericne of an easy and clear gold purchase, visit EG gold and jewelry store.
