The Asante people of Ghana in Africa made forms like these to weigh gold dust, which they used as currency from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Their first gold weights were simple geometric forms, like the stepped pyramid. Later, they made more realistic forms like the fish and scorpion, and proverbs or morals were associated with them. The little man smoking a pipe is balancing a powder keg on his head! Perhaps the proverb “no good can come from playing with a dangerous man” applies to him.