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Ancient weights and measures

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Ancient Weights and Measures

Many of the ancient weights and measures used throughout history are variations on a common theme sharing the same system. Despite a number of different civilisations making adjustments to serve their own purposes the accuracy and agreement of definitions improved over time.

Measurements that are used to define property are often used to impose taxes or tithes resulting in there being one measure for ordinary transactions and another for royal or religious transactions. Though throughout history people and their various representatives in guilds and lobbys, have been very scrupulous in defending the value of their possessions, governments and religions are even more scrupulous about getting their cut.

The first measures were the lengths of the ditches that bordered and defined the fields. Since people tend to pace off a distance differently, knotted cords were used to measure their sides and cord stretchers became the first surveyors.


Ancient Cultures sharing similar systems of measurement

Later developments of the original systems

Unrelated systems

References

References

ArchaeologyColin Renfrew
A History of Seafaring George F Bass
The Ancient Near East William H McNeil and Jean W Sedlar
The Epic of GillgameshTranslated by Andrew George
The Ancient Near East James B. Pritchard
Bahrain through the Ages,
Shaika Haya Ali Al Khalifa and Michael Rice
Prehistory and Protohistory of the Arabian Peninsula
Dr. Muhammed Abdul Nayeem
Mesopotamia 10 The Sumerian Language Marie-Loise Thomsen
Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East" Michael Roaf
The Archaeology of Ancient China Chang
The Arabic Alphabet Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano
Gardiner Egyptian Grammar § 266 for names of Egyptian units
A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egytian Raymond O Faulkner
Ancient Egyptian Antonio Loprieno
Atlas of Ancient Egypt Baines and Ma'lek
Egypt's Making Michael Rice
Mathematics in the time of the Pharoahs, Gillings, chapter 20.
Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture
Somers Clarke and R. Englebach
InSearch of the Indo Europeans J. P. Mallory
Rivers in the Desert Nelson Glueck
From Alpha to Omega Anne H. Groton
Our Latin Heritage Hines
The Ten Books on Architecture Vitruvius
The Geography Claudias Ptolemy
The History of Herodotus
Old Hittite Sentence Structure Silvia Luraghi
The Rise of the Greeks, Michael Grant
A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest
Alex Patterson
The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics
Lucas N. h. Bunt, Phillip S.Jones, Jack D. Bedient
The World of Measurements H Arthur Klein
Norman's Parrallel of the Orders of Architecture R. A. Cordingley
The Medieval Machine Jean Gimpel
The Atlas of the CrusadesHJohnathan Riley Smith
The Plantagenet Chronicles Elizabeth Hallam
Medieval Warfare H.W. Koch
  • Measure for Measure, Richard Young and Thomas Glover, ISBN 1-889796-00-X.
  • Masse und Gewichte, Marvin A. Powell

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