Talk:Ancient Greek units of measurement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Please see ancient weights and measures for previous edit history and discussions wrt this article.
Contents |
[edit] Cleanup
This article is not in Wiki format and needs a bit of work. Xaa 23:44, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Shusi?
The "sh" phoneme doesn't exist in Ancient Greek, and neither does "ch" as in "cherry." That's why Chandragupta became "Sandracottus" (Σανδρακόττος). There are numerous other non-Greek words in the table. It's not clear which system they come from and what they are being compared with. --69.245.192.52 00:29, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
- comparae ancient digits
- "1 digit, "shusi" or "uban" (+/- 17.67 mm) Assyria"
Rktect 15:31, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
Shushi is a reduplicated semitic root with the sense of divide evenly into fingers or measure. shh to cut or divide shwy evenly
ENTRY: shh DEFINITION: To sharpen, scrape off, peel. Swahili, from Arabic sawil, of the coast, Swahili, from sawil, plural of sil, coast, active participle of saala, to scrape off, smooth, plane.
ENTRY: shwy. DEFINITION: Central Semitic, to be(come) even, equal. 1. Shiviti, from Hebrew iwwîtî, I have set (first word of Psalm 16:8), from iwwâ, to set, place, derived stem of *wâ, to be(come) even. 2. schwa, from Hebrew w, schwa, probably from Aramaic (Syriac) (nuqz) wayy, even (points), plural passive participle of w, to be even, equal.
The Greeks standards of Measure come from Ugarit by way of the Akkadians, Mittani, Luwians, Hittites and various sea peoples such as the Luka, Weshesh, Meshwesh, Peleset, Tjecker, Danoi, Shardana and Kretanoi. I suppose a shorter way to put that would be through the Phoenicians and Punics especially as regards standards of measure used in the copper trade, boatbuilding, cedar wood from Lebanon, grain shipments from Egypt in return for olive oil, and the Persian influence in connection with the cities of Sideon and Tyre up to the tiem of Alexander.
- The above has only an indirect bearing on this article. Since the article is about *Greek* units of measurement, Greek terminology should be used. Petrouchka 11:31, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Disputed
See also User:Egil/Sandbox/rktect#Articles_under_attack -- Egil 15:33, 27 August 2005 (UTC) Egil I looked at your sandbox there is nothing in it but kitty litter. Try stating specifically what fact you dispute and then backing it up with a referenceRktect 01:00, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
- The dispute for this page in particular is to the table of units of lengths, which contain many many definitions of units in terms of some claimed common Greek daktylos, and in particular many forign units. This is dubious, and I'm afraid the burden of proof falls on whoever presented these definitions. -- Egil 07:54, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
When you dispute things it would be good if you could cite specifically what it is you dispute. Your simply not being familiar with a term doesn't make it not so. Note that both the finger size and composition of the foot as 4 palms and 3 hands are variables. The Egyptian foot can be divided into either hands or feet because the mh or foot cubit glyph is placed across the 15-16 interval.
- As you can see in the above table 18 mm is in the
- Egyptian 16 fingers of 18.75 mm = 4 palms = 300 mm
- Roman 16 fingers of 18.5 mm = 4 palms = 296 mm range
- 20mm and 21 mm are in the Mesopotamian range with
- Mesopotamian 15 fingers of 20 mm = 3 hands = 300 mm = Olympic pous
- Mesopotamian 15 fingers of 21 mm = 3 hands = 315 mm = Pergamene pous
- Mesopotamian 15 fingers of 21 mm = 3 hands = 315 mm = Aeginetan pous
- similar to the Athenian pous of 316 mm
You can generally tell at a glance which system you are looking at but for the uninitiated the expectation that all measures are divided into palms and the failure to think about whether the divisions are palms, hands, fists, spans, or quarters can result in confusion.
The variety of Greek pous are normally categorized as short, median and long
- short is generally 300 mm, 304.8 mm, 308.4 mm
- median is 315 mm, 316 mm
- long includes anything from 325 mm up to 375 mm which is a remen.
but generally either the Attic Greek pous of 308.4 mm or the Ionian Greek pous of 296 mm or the remen of 375 mm are used for stadia measures.
- Foot based stadia are 185 mm
- remen based stadia are 222 m
- cubit based stadia are 157.5 m
- [comparae ancient digits]
- "1 digit, "shusi" or "uban" (+/- 17.67 mm) Assyria"
- "1 digit or "digitus" = 18.44 mm Rome"
- "1 digit or zebo (=18.7 mm) Egypt (anglicizing dj as z/ebo in an archaic way)"
- "1 digit or "daktylos" - plural : "daktyloi" (= 19.3 mm) Greece"
(claimed common Greek daktylos 19.275 mm makes a pous of 308.4 mm)
In addition there are all the feet in between Mesopotamia and Egypt in Palestine and along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean which all generally are some integral number of fingers in the range 18-20 mm usually also integrally palms or hands.
As Stecchini points out 3 hands of 15 fingers or 4 palms of 16 fingers are commonly taken as feet and 5 palms and 10 palms as remen and double remen respectively, and 4 hands or 5 palms ordinary cubits and 6 hands or 7 palms great cubits and 8 palms or 6 hands being considered a nibw or double foot, but there are also examples of measures running up to 8 palms or 9 hands sometimes being mistaken for feet when they are really elles or yards respectively.
Since that covers the integrals 4,8,12,16,20,24,28,32 and 5,10,15,20,25,30 what remains are generally multiples of fists 6,12,18,24,30,36, spans, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and quarters 12,24,36,48,60
That gives you common increments of feet divided into fingers at 15,16,18,20 and some rare instances of feet that are 17, 19 or 21 fingers long. The English cubit vestigally preserved as the diamond on the Stanley tape measure which measures 19.2" is divided into 24 fingers of .8" or 20.32 mm implying its foot is 16 fingers or 325.12 mm or a long Greek foot.
I realize that all of that is stuff you don't know or at least didn't before, but it makes you look foolish to argue against such basic and easily citable facts.
When you go to a site and it says something you don't need to assume everything it says is correct. Often you will need to separate the wheat from the chaff, but after a few decades of study it will all start to make some sense to you I hope.
Rktect 15:24, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
- Without independent citations, the enormous number of assertions above carry no weight. This is the discussion page, not the main article! If the article is disputed and these facts are "easily citable" (which is untrue, by the way: it'd take a hell of a lot of work to provide definite evidence for all of these), then citations of some ancient texts are obviously needed; like others, I am also unsure what is disputed, but the material above neither proves nor resolves anything.
- BTW a lot of the entries on the page as it stands contain gibberish -- e.g. "1 uncia âˆ" -- I presume the ∠gibberish is an error that's happened somewhere along the way and somehow been replicated. Does anyone know what it's supposed to read? There are numerous problems with singular/plural forms of words too. Petrouchka 11:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
What is it exactly that the dispute is about? Federal Street 03:13, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Moved external link to German Wikipedia
I removed the following link from this entry as the page it links to is in German. I moved the links to the German Wikipedia.
Epolk 21:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] dichas
[edit] Display of characters
There's something very wrong (I think) with the character set(s) that were used by one or more editors in the past. For example, I see "1 uncia âˆ" for the third entry in the table. The wikitext is
1 ''uncia''<!--Roman?--> âˆ
I can't fix it, because I don't know what it's supposed to say. Ardric47 22:13, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
