Measurement – Part 1

Measuring as the measure of civilization.

How we measure things seems like a simple proposition, and it is when we’re measuring objects and other things in our own daily lives.  But how we measure things as a society, through government, is much more complicated, and prone to abuse.

In his book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent uses the earliest known measuring devices to explain that humans’ innate capacity to count has some pretty significant limits, in that humans can only naturally count so high before they need to rely on measurement:

The earliest evidence for what we might describe as measurement comes in the form of animal bones carved with notches. These metrological relics include the Ishango Bone, a baboon fibula between 18,000 and 20,000 years old, and the Wolf Bone, older still at roughly 33,000 years in age. Reading their meaning is like any augury, indefinite and intuitive, but archaeologists think the ordering of marks on these bones might make them tally sticks: the first formal measuring tools … In the case of the Wolf Bone, its incisions are divided into groups of five, a common boundary in many numeral systems … When tested on our ability to count at a glance, humans can usually take in three or four items at most. More than that and we need to start consciously numbering. We need to measure. These notched bones, then, may mark the moment, repeated many times around the world, that our species’ ambition exceeded the capacity of our brains and we reached for external support … [S]tudies of children suggest that measurement, like writing and counting, is a cultural skill rather than an intuition we are born with.

We owe early moves toward measurement not only for all the things we enjoy today in the modern world, but also for communication through writing.  Vincent explains how measurement and writing had mutually reinforcing origins:

Fast forward a few millennia, and, like a shopper burdened with too much pocket change, the Mesopotamians were fed up with their clutter of tokens [which they had used to count, one token for each object counted]. To better organise them, they began making clay containers known as bullae to enclose them into groups. These bullae started appearing around 3500 BC, as bumpy spheres the size of tennis balls, filled with clay tokens and sealed like a baby’s rattle. One bulla could then be used to track multiple items. This technology had its advantages and disadvantages. If you are, for example, a Sumerian priest recording tributes from farmers, you’d be happy that your clay spheres couldn’t be tampered with, but annoyed that you couldn’t check their contents without breaking them. So, one day, while making your latest bulla, before you put the tokens inside, you press them firmly on to the clay’s wet exterior as a reminder of the contents. It was the work of a moment but a crucial step, says archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who first recognised the importance of these clay tokens as the precursors of modern writing. It was here, she says, that “three-dimensional tokens were reduced to two- dimensional markings” constituting “the first signs of writing.”  And it was a profound cognitive leap. “It is the beginning of a new communication system, and certainly had to have reflected something enormous in the brain,” she says. “It was liberating.” … Over the centuries, this system evolved. First, instead of impressing tokens on to clay, scribes began tracing their outlines, creating pictographs, or pictures of words. Second, realising that all the information they wanted was now stored on the exterior of the bullae and their contents were redundant, the scribes squashed these clay balls into thick tablets, removing the need for tokens altogether. Third, they began using different signs to signify the item being counted and its quantity. Instead of tracing a pictograph of a jar of oil to represent each jar of oil, they began using separate symbols for “what the thing is” and “how much of it there is.” With this change, you have not only the beginning of formal number systems and writing, but also the beginning of measurement.

While it’s often assumed that we need government to officially define units of measurement to prevent chaos in the exchange of goods, government didn’t play a role in early, and successful, cooperative efforts:

It’s often assumed that the state is needed to create this shared space [of commerce], but historical evidence of the development of measurement suggests otherwise. Take, for example, the ancient use of mass standards: stones carved into regular shapes like spools, cubes, and ovals that were placed in balance pans to weigh goods. These can be found buried deep in the archaeological record, appearing from around 3000 BC onwards. This is centuries before the first descriptions of “royal” standards appear, suggesting rulers co-opted as much as they created consistent standards of measure. Despite the lack of any central regulation, these ancient mass standards are incredibly consistent in their values. One analysis of more than 2,000 standards used across Mesopotamia, the Aegean, Anatolia, and Europe found that the weight of these stones differed very little between 3000 and 1000 BC. The total variation among the standards, which were recovered from locations thousands of kilometres distant, is between just 9 and 13 per cent. The conclusion is that Bronze Age merchants were capable of regulating units of measurement without the need for an overarching authority, with each individual meeting between traders serving as an opportunity to compare and adjust their weights … Unlike some other forms of measurement, weighing objects in this era could be achieved quickly and accurately through the use of an equal-arm balance -- a tool so simple and complete in its design that it’s still in use, unchanged, in many parts of the world thousands of years later.

And as Zachary Karabell writes in his book The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World: “Before the modern era, the primary sources of revenue were taxes on land levied from nobles and customs duties levied on trade. For centuries, it wasn’t government that kept the best records; merchants did. They were the ones who refined methods of accounting, bookkeeping, costs, and incomes, and they were at the core of the development of banking and notes of credit that are the precursors to all contemporary finance.”

But then government got involved in a big way, and government came to quickly use measurement as a tool for authority, starting in ancient Egypt and Babylonia.  As Vincent writes:

The roots of measurement are entangled with those of civilisation, traceable back to the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. It was these societies that first learned to apply consistent units in construction, trade, and astronomy, building towering monuments to gods and kings, and mapping the stars with their newfound power. As units of measurement developed they became a tool of authority, claimed as the prerogative of the powerful, who used measurement to organise the world to their liking … [W]hen we try to measure some particular aspect of the world, we are inevitably making a choice that reflects our biases and desires. Measurement is a tool that reinforces what we find important in life, what we think is worth paying attention to. The question, then, of who gets to make those choices is of the utmost importance … [A]s the satirist Jonathan Swift put it centuries before: “Philosophers, who find Some fav’rite System to their Mind In ev’ry Point to make it fit, Will force all Nature to submit.”

Vincent describes a tour he took of one of the earliest examples of the use of measurement as a tool for authority, located near the Nile River, which nourished ancient Egyptian agriculture:

Capturing this abundance [of water] required ingenuity, and Salima [Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo] is taking me to see one of the tools used for this task: an artefact of ancient measurement that is testimony to metrology’s role as the kindling of civilisation. It is a nilometer: a measuring tool used by the ancient Egyptians to gauge the depths of the Nile’s floodwaters each year. These readings were vital, as the depth of flooding determined whether the year’s harvest would be slim or bountiful, an insight that powered the operations of the state like the mainspring of a clock. If the nilometers said a famine was coming, then food would need to be set aside to sustain the people and stem unrest. If they predicted the harvest would be plentiful, then appropriate taxes could be levied in the form of crops, labour, and land … [A]round 3000 BC ,.. the first of Egypt’s dynastic kings began to unify the lands. “Even then people were reliant on the Nile, and one of the reasons we think the whole ancient Egyptian state came about, with the creation of writing and bureaucracy and so on, was to organise access to the water and land,” she says. “You have to figure out a way of documenting who owns the water and who gets access to it, and that requires the state.” … In the first century AD, when Egypt was under Roman rule, historian Pliny the Elder described how figures taken from a nilometer thought to be in Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt, were used to gauge the country’s fortunes. :When the water rises to only twelve cubits, [Egypt] experiences the horrors of famine,” he wrote. “When it attains thirteen, hunger is still the result; a rise of fourteen cubits is productive of gladness; a rise of fifteen sets all anxieties at rest; while an increase of sixteen is productive of unbounded transports of joy.”

So closely entwined was measurement with authority, that measuring sticks became royal scepters:

In Cairo’s sprawling Egyptian Museum, you can find the means by which measures were first made consistent in ancient Egypt. They are cubit measuring rods, among the world’s first standardised units of measurement. They were constructed from stone and wood, with intervals marked out in palms and fingers and their lengths certified by a central authority for official use … In one tall glass-fronted case you can see a collection of length standards from across the centuries: metrological swagger sticks fashioned from wood, bronze, and steel. Like Gudea’s ruler, they are hybrid objects, part measuring standard and part sceptre, and proof of the utility of measurement in constructing social order.

But for the common person, measurement was long done using a person’s own body parts.  As Vincent writes:

[T]he first tools of measurement we turn to are our own bodies. Common units like the hand and foot are still in use today, while others are at least familiar, like the cubit (the length from the elbow to the fingertip) and fathom (the span of your outstretched arms) … Using our bodies to measure the world makes intuitive sense. It is a scale appropriate to human activity and means that measuring tools are always at hand. The same logic applied to many other pre-modern measures, which were defined by the expediencies of everyday life. This often meant they were elastic in their values, shrinking or expanding with their environment.

Early governments sometimes tried to work with these human-scale units, but in a way that averaged them out at least a bit, bringing them closer to a uniform means of measurement:

Sometimes these accommodations would be enshrined in law, as with the proclamation of King David I of Scotland in around 1150, in which he defines the inch as a thumb-length “mesouret at the rut of the nayll,” [measured at the rut of the nail] with the addendum that this unit needs to be taken as an average of “the thowmys [average] of iii [3] men, that is to say a mekill [large] man, and a man of messurabel statur, and of a lytell [little] man.” By combining measures from three men – little, medium, and mekill – the law accounts for vagaries in anthropometric units, even if the result is still essentially a rule of thumb.

But these crude means proved inadequate, and societies moved from individuals measuring with their own thumbs to governments measuring -- and in ways in which government sometimes puts its own thumb on the scale.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how the government’s involvement with measurement, and its abuse of that vast power, came to spur some of the most significant social and political revolutions in history.