Notes on Egyptian weights and measures / F.L. Griffith.

Francis Llewellyn Griffith

Date:: [1892]

Credit: Notes on Egyptian weights and measures / F.L. Griffith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

37/56 page 31

$The Harris Papyrus I, for incense, etc., uses the without multiples, (with the subdivision e.g., 70, b, 6), but for corn and salt the e-g; 54, a, H or apt. <>111 ,0 , with the multiple -pj- and the subdivision The unit T I I I ,0 must be the quadruple - hekt, We have now traced the history of the /□ measures as exem¬ plified in numerous documents from the Xllth to the XXth dynasty, a period embracing perhaps 1500 years. At first we find the hekt system of notation, already elaborately developed, used as a general measure for solids and even for liquids, but more especially for corn and other common vegetable foods. In the Hyksos period we find the unit doubled and quadrupled, yet for general purposes the single hekt still holds its ground. With the New Kingdom, however, the peculiar notation for multiples is dropped, the single hekt gives way to the quadruple hekt (now called the apt) for bulky food-products, and the pp a further multiple by four, forming part of the series, seems to drive out the khar, an independent unit of nearly the same value (5 quadruple hekt). It is perhaps not too □ J A, “ rule, and fanciful to see derivatives from the words part of the capital city of Thebes, in the names of the first and O A fin second leading measures hekt, , and apt, f ; the reading of the 1 ^ third pV is quite unknown. A text of Shashank I at Karnak (Brugsch, Thes., V, p. 1229) possibly indicates a reversion from the quadruple to the single hekt for corn measures in the XXIInd dynasty. The fractional symbols and the dimidiated tenths, —q, xoj io, (r, i henu ?) are used. In Ptolemaic times the system of measures was most com¬ pletely changed, while preserving a few relics of Pharaonic usage. According to well-known data,* the “ Ptolemaic medimnus ” of Didymus = about 7878 litres; this makes about 160 to 165 henu, or 1 ft- 14 seems as if the Graeco-Egyptians had borrowed a Greek name and applied it to an ancient Egyptian measure of different value from the Attic medimnus. Didymus also gives the * Hultsch, Griech. und Rom. Metrologie, 2nd ed., p. 2S4.$

Notes on Egyptian weights and measures / F.L. Griffith.

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