Originally posted by The VagabondGood find SWIB. I don't know why nobody has replied on it yet. I haven't had time to look into it
much yet because I'm about to have to leave, but does the source give the measure of the increments on those rulers? That should just about answer
the question, shouldn't it?
I don't know if the source did or not, my search was for pictures of these rods, I neither kept the link nor
looked back to see if I posted same. However from one of my books on Egypt by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson in associaton with the British Museum:
The main unit of measurement was the royal cubit (52.4cm), approximately the length of a man's forearm and represented by the hieroglyph ??
(wish I knew how to show it). The royal cubit comprised 7 palm widths each of 4 digits of the thumb width (thus 28 digits to the cubit).
Artists generally used a grid to lay out their drawings, and until the end of the Third Intermediate period they used the short cubit of six palms
(44.9cm) which was roughly the length from elbow to thumb tip, conventionally 45cm.
There is more about usage in later periods of the Persian cubit.
A number of measuring rods, including the wooden examples used by craftsmen and surveyors, have survived. The most detailed knowledege of the
cubit derives not from workaday measures, which could vary considerably, but from ceremonial cubit-rods cut in stone and deposited in temples, or
occassionally buried with officials. These were also inscribed with other useful information such as inundation levels or references to nomes
(provinces), forming a kind of a compendium of the sort once found in school exercise books in Europe.
This book also includes two pictures of
rods, both of which have equally spaced lines, one even looks much like a ruler with its lesser cm markings, as well as equally spaced grooves but
spaced wider apart than the lines, obviously for less intricate measure and longer measure.
