How did early civilizations measure length?

Question

need to Know how early civilization's measured time, length, volume, mass, and temperature? What tools did they use for these things in early times?

Answer 1

I remember in Neolithic days each tribe, or group of tribes, had an official pacer. When they wanted to know how far a place was "exactly" from their caves, they always used the same guy to pace it off and count his steps. When that guy died, they'd try to pick a new fellow whose pace was the same length. If they didn't need that much exactitude, they'd say "Oh, half a day's walk" or "two days by river, downstream."

We'd measure heights the same way. "How tall is that tree Jondalar? If we chop it so that it falls across the river, will it go all the way, or fall short of the other bank?" And Jondalar would have to carefully estimate the tree's height in paces, the river's width in paces, and tell the tribe chief yea or nay. And if the tree fell into the river, Jondalar would probably be tossed in right behind it.

Measuring distances or heights, mapping, and other sorts of primitive surveying, was one of the highest-tech jobs of the Stone Age. We didn't have trigonometry back then, and although we did understand many of the same geometrical ideas that you can intuit today, they were just rules of thumb to us, rather than the structured study that Euclid would make it thousands of years later.

Answer 2

The ancient Egyptians measured length and volume in pretty much the same way we do, and in doing so established the mathematical basis of geometry.

Mass was also measured in the same way we do, although not with the same units.

Time, on the other hand, was very hard to measure. A day was always a day, but hours and minutes originated in the middle ages. In ancient times people would use comparisons; e.g. "You need to boil the stew for as long as it takes grandpa to walk to market and back".

    

Answer 3

Many different.  It would depend on the civilization, I suppose.  But it's impossible to build large-scale projects like cities and so on without standard measurements.  They also help a lot when fighting wars.

But the cubit is a well known one used in the Bible.  It's the length from the elbow to the fingertip.  Obviously it can differ from person to person, but I think for an adult it's an average of 18-24 inches.

Answer 4

They used the ruler's foot or body parts, the smallest seed they could find, and other things that were around them.

The English Foot used to come from a ruler with a 12" foot.  Of course as ruler's changed so did the standard so they had to come up with something else.  Eventually that standard foot became a bar with graduations on it; a ruler that was kept to the same size.

Merchants where known for shaving some of the precious metal off of coins or for having scales that cheated the customer.  These scales were calibrated with a set of weights kept by the local rulers and they were supposed to all be using the same weights, but often cheated; so smart travelers carried their own scales.

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...

"The inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3000–1500 BCE, Mature period 2600–1900 BCE) developed a sophisticated system of standardization, using weights and measures, evident by the excavations made at the Indus valley sites. This technical standardization enabled gauging devices to be effectively used in angular measurement and measurement for construction. Calibration was also found in measuring devices along with multiple subdivisions in case of some devices.

The earliest known uniform systems of weights and measures seem all to have been created at some time in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC among the ancient peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, and perhaps also Elam (in Iran) as well. The most astounding of these ancient systems was perhaps that of the Indus Valley Civilization (ca. 2600 BC). The Indus Valley peoples achieved great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time. Their measurements were extremely precise since their smallest division, which is marked on an ivory scale found in Lothal, was approximately 1.704 mm, the smallest division ever recorded on a scale of the Bronze Age. The decimal system was used. Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their hexahedron weights. Weights were based on units of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500, with each unit weighing approximately 28 grams, similar to the English ounce or Roman uncia, and smaller objects were weighed in similar ratios with the units of 0.871.

Other systems were based on the use of parts of the body and the natural surroundings as measuring instruments. Early Babylonian and Egyptian records and the Bible indicate that length was first measured with the forearm, hand, or finger and that time was measured by the periods of the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. When it was necessary to compare the capacities of containers such as gourds or clay or metal vessels, they were filled with plant seeds which were then counted to measure the volumes. When means for weighing were invented, seeds and stones served as standards. For instance, the carat, still used as a unit for gems, was derived from the carob seed."

The article continues at length on different systems with references to how specific cultures made their measurements; from the US to the SI standard, to Mesopotamia and Roman (who used a lot of things from the Greeks, which were further adopted by the Christians).

The Romans and Chinese both independently invented a geared cart that counted the number of steps to a mile and allowed road makers to put down mile markers.  Of course in Rome they were leagues and something else to the Chinese, but we still put mile markers on our roads today.

Bill Cosby did an early comedy routine with the Lord talking to Noah telling to build an ark and he gave out the size in cubits and Noah said; "Right, what's a cubit?" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubit).

This causes scholars problems to this day because you can argue which cubit did he use?

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ar...

"On a more practical plane, Hippolytus explained that the ark was built in three stories, the lowest for wild beasts, the middle for birds and domestic animals, and the top level for humans, and that the male animals were separated from the females by sharp stakes to help maintain the prohibition against cohabitation aboard the vessel. Similarly dwelling on practical matters, Origen (c. 182–251), responding to a critic who doubted that the Ark could contain all the animals in the world, countered with a learned argument about cubits, holding that Moses, the traditional author of the book of Genesis, had been brought up in Egypt and would therefore have used the larger Egyptian cubit. He also fixed the shape of the Ark as a truncated pyramid, rectangular rather than square at its base, and tapering to a square peak one cubit on a side; it was not until the 12th century that it came to be thought of as a rectangular box with a sloping roof."

This Wikipedia article:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynam...

Explains Lord Kelvin and Anders Celsius worked on a temperature scale, but it was not done for a very long time.  Early man probably only had cold, fine, warm and hot; there is no French word for warm only "tepid" not hot.  They were concerned a great deal with temperature.

The measurement of time was incredibly important and usually the first job of the religious leaders because they determined the right time to plant and to harvest.  This is why Stonehenge was built; it is a giant clock.  The Mayans had their calendars and so did the Egyptians.  Time in the day was usually measured with a stick in the ground and the size of its shadow.

Answer 5

They used their body parts such as their hands and feet to determine and measure the length of things.  The idea of the meter is 1/10,000,000 of a distance from the equator to the pole of Earth.