![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/2cadc963b3752fb99b5b6c81beace352.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
As you know, there were very variable measurement systems in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, depending on the region within the same country. It is difficult to say precisely why political unity, when there was one in a given country, did not make it possible to systematize the use of the same standard of measurement throughout the country, because it is quite astonishing to see that the cubit, the foot, the pound etc. vary from one region to another during the medieval period. The answer to this question on the variability and versatility of measures is undoubtedly due to the fact that the birth of modern nations has been accompanied by the emergence of a rational State which has increasingly taken the place of a rational administration (legal) of social relationship. The French Revolution of 1789 carried out the efforts at rationalization that we had seen develop with the appearance of a strong State from the end of the wars of religion and the reign of Louis XIV in France: the metric system (based on a segment of the Greenwich meridian) in base 10, makes it possible to obtain measurements of surfaces, distances and volumes which are the same everywhere and which do not vary according to whether one is in Normandy, Lorraine or Provence. For those interested in the point Didot (the printing point under the French monarchy), its value was 1/72 of a foot (of the king's foot)... which king's foot could not be a foot of English king, nor a symbolic value as guinea was ! see here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France and here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_Fren... Le 25/01/2022 à 20:28, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context a écrit :
Am 25.01.22 um 18:27 schrieb Aditya Mahajan:
On Tue, 25 Jan 2022, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context wrote:
why didn’t "we" stick to the Roman system?
All you need to do is look at the definitions of roman imperial units to understand why we didn't stick to that:
An inch was the width of the base of the thumb, a foot, well length of a foot, a fathom was the width of outstretched arms, yard was the length of the man's belt, mile was 1000 paces of marching roman soldiers, and so on.
Ah, of course. So “normalization” to some ruler’s shoe size was already progress.
In India, from what I am aware, the pre-imperial units of measurements had similar origins as imperial. Length was based on width of fingers, cubit (also used in other civilizations of the time), person-height and so on. As with the imperial units, these definitions were not uniform and went through a uniformization process in the middle ages. However, India moved to imperial units with colonization, and adopted metric system after Independence.
Some of the units, particularly for measurement of land area, are still in use as they are effectively codified in the land records.
Interesting.
Wikipedia has some summary of the ancient and medieval systems in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_units_of_measurement
But it got more complicated than that (particularly for time). See, for example: https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicsmiscellany/time-measurement-in-anci...
Oh, that is nice!
There is also this fascinating book which covers the non-European history of mathematics (a lot of which in ancient times was to do with units and measurements but more importantly, calculations): https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691135267/the-crest-of-the-p...
Yes, that’s probably worth reading.
Thank you! Hraban ___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net archive : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
-- Jean-Pierre Delange Ancients&Moderns Professeur Agrégé de Philosophie (HC)