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-ancient-india
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-peacock
Yes, that’s probably worth reading.
Thank you!
Hraban
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