Technikatörténeti szemle 9. (1977)

A MÉRÉS ÉS A MÉRTÉK AZ EMBERI MŰVELŐDÉSBEN című konferencián Budapesten 1976. április 27–30-án elhangzott előadások I. rész - Bowsher, H. F.: Régi mértékegységek fejlődése

Pliny, in describing the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, reveals his cubit is 9/10 of the equatorial cubit. Pliny's foot and cubit have been set equal to the proposed values of the foot and cubit of Thebes, respectively. The discussion will now switch to Stonehenge and its meaning with respect to the state of technical and scientific knowledge at the time of its construction. The builders of Stonehenge, according to Professor Hawkins, were not local people who had occupied that land for centuries but were different groups who had recently moved to England from the continent. These people brought with them the scientific knowledge and technical skills of that era. All that the designers and builders intended that Stonehenge should be, cannot be completely known. Professor Hawkins believes Stonehenge proves that these ancient men had been able through the use of Stonehenge to determine with good precision the significant positions of the sun and moon in their orbits around the earth. Stonehenge was also used for recording such information. Obviously the builders felt that the anticipated benefits were worth the great expenditure of effort wich he estimates was equal to 1,500,000 man days of work not including the original designing. Apparently a better understanding and record of lunar and solar motions was considered important to a number of advanced groups of people of that era. The most important aspect of Stonehenge seems to differ from that of the ancient Egyptian monuments. Stonehenge was apparently designed to measure motion and time whereas the works of the ancient Egyptians appear to emphasize the importance of geometry and geography. Stonehenge was to time as the Great Pyramid was to space. Stonehenge seems to prove that man's need to structure time is as great as his need to structure space and that he seeks to express time as well as space in terms of that which he considers has the most fundamental and universal significance. The recording of lunar and solar positions required only that the stones be placed so as to indicate important directions. The radii of the various circles could assume any values without affecting this type of information. It is interesting that the radii of two important circles, the Aubrey and Sarsen circles, may have been laid out using two basically different length units. The diameter of the Sarsen circle has been measured to be 1168 English feet which is very close to one hundred times the proposed value for the Roman foot of 11.664 English inches. The radius of the Aubrey circle has been measured as 1728 English inches. Tihs is exactly 100 times the proposed value for the Egyptian short cubit and the old Italian cubit. The discussion will now be shifted to the work of the Babylonians during their second period of greatness. Recently it has been discovered that although the Babylonian collection of astronomical data appears modest, the mathematical techniques they used in analyzing the data were excellent. They, however, developed no theories or models of the universe which threatened the fundamental role of the earth and celestial motions in structuring a basic view of space or time; consequently, no major metrological changes occurred. The Greeks were very ingenious in devising models of the universe; however, all of their models contained the very ancient concepts of the uniqueness