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The ancient Egyptian royal cubit (meh niswt) is the earliest attested standard measure.Cubit rods were used for the measurement of length.A number of these rods have survived: two are known from the tomb of Maya, the treasurer of the 18th dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamun, in Saqqara; another was found in the tomb of Kha in Thebes.
One official government standard of measurement of the archaic system was the Cubit of Nippur (2650 BCE). It is a Euboic Mana + 1 Diesis (432 grams). [ citation needed ] This standard is the main reference used by archaeologists to reconstruct the system.
The setat was the basic unit of land measure and may originally have varied in size across Egypt's nomes. [20] Later, it was equal to one square khet, where a khet measured 100 cubits. The setat could be divided into strips one khet long and ten cubit wide (a kha). [2] [6] [37] During the Old Kingdom:
One cubit is originally the length from someone's elbow to the tip of their middle finger; it usually translates to approximately half a metre ±10%, with an ancient Roman cubit being as long as 120 cm. One cubit was equal to 6–7 palms, one palm being the width of a hand not including the thumb.
Detail of a cubit rod in the Museo Egizio of Turin The earliest recorded systems of weights and measures originate in the 3rd or 4th millennium BC. Even the very earliest civilizations needed measurement for purposes of agriculture, construction and trade. Early standard units might only have applied to a single community or small region, with every area developing its own standards for ...
Pyramid inch – a unit of length, believed to be equal to 1 ⁄ 25 of the cubit; Rod; Sana lamjel; Spat – a unit of length equal to 1,000,000,000 km (620,000,000 mi) Stadion; Step; Unglie; Vara – an Aragonese, Spanish, and Portuguese unit [3] Yojana – a Vedic measure of distance used in ancient India. Its value was about 10 km (6.2 mi ...
In Ancient Egypt it was the basic unit of subdivision of the cubit. [1] On surviving Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods, the royal cubit is divided into seven palms of four digits or fingers each. [3] The royal cubit measured approximately 525 mm, [4] so the length of the ancient Egyptian digit was about 19 mm.
Flinders Petrie reported on a rod that shows a length of 520.5 mm, a few millimetres less than the Egyptian cubit. [8] A slate measuring rod was also found, divided into fractions of a Royal Cubit and dating to the time of Akhenaten. [9] Further cubit rods have been found in the tombs of officials.