Talk:History of measurement/Archive 1

message: : The various leagues at ~4km also enters the picture, but these seem to have 
: a simple, pedestrian origin. The French league later connects it to the meridian.
: Pull out your standard everyday run of the mill Stanly tape measure and you should
: see a diamond at 19.2" That is the ancient ordinary English cubit and its 
: the basis of the English League of three modern miles or 
: anciently in the time when a mile was 8 furlongs of 600 feet, 
: 14,400 ft and 9,000 diamonds.
Egil 13:49 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)
: I don't know about Goethe, but 
: Ole Rømer was a big player in the 4-minute geographical mile.
: Elizabeth I added the 280 ft to make an 8-furlong mile.  
Gene Nygaard 17:52, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leauges and the Vestigal Remnant of ther English Cubit on the Stanley Tape Measure 

message: :For that you go to Herodotus (and Ptolomy) 
:Herodotus explains that the Persian stadia are 500 to a degree 
:rather than 600 so their stadion is 222 meters rather than 185 and 
:based on 750 Persian feet rather than 600 Greek feet.
:The geographical ~7.5 km mile, land and sea, is the brainchild of Ole Rømer - the Prussian king later adopting it. 
:VI. Further, the length of the seacoast of Egypt itself is sixty “schoeni”1 --of Egypt, that is, as we judge it to be, reaching from the Plinthinete gulf to the Serbonian marsh, which is under the Casian mountain--between these there is this length of sixty schoeni. [2] Men that have scant land measure by feet; those that have more, by miles; those that have much land, by parasangs; and those who have great abundance of it, by schoeni. [3] The parasang is three and three quarters miles, and the schoenus, which is an Egyptian measure, is twice that.
:VII. By this reckoning, then, the seaboard of Egypt will be four hundred and fifty miles in length. Inland from the sea as far as Heliopolis, Egypt is a wide land, all flat and watery and marshy. From the sea up to Heliopolis is a journey about as long as the way from the altar of the twelve gods at Athens to the temple of Olympian Zeus at Pisa. [2] If a reckoning is made, only a little difference of length, not more than two miles, will be found between these two journeys; for the journey from Athens to Pisa is two miles short of two hundred, which is the number of miles between the sea and Heliopolis.
:IX. From Heliopolis to Thebes is nine days' journey by river, and the distance is six hundred and eight miles, or eighty-one schoeni. [2] This, then, is a full statement of all the distances in Egypt: the seaboard is four hundred and fifty miles long; and I will now declare the distance inland from the sea to Thebes : it is seven hundred and sixty-five miles. And between Thebes and the city called Elephantine there are two hundred and twenty-five miles.
:81 schoeni = 608 miles 
:1 schoeni = 7.5miles = 1/10 degree = 11.1 km 
Parasan = 30  furlongs
:The British nautical mile may have been due to a want of having a sea mile in the same order of magnitude as their land mile? The relationship between the Roman and British land miles are, as you note, well documented. -- Egil 08:48, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Herodotus on the length of ancient measures