mina (Mesopotamian)
Mesopotamia / Levant · Antiquity
mina (Mesopotamian) is a mass measurement concept whose value depends on the named historical, regional, textual, or commodity variant.
variantMore from Mesopotamia / Levant →Convert familiar measurements into the historical, scientific and unusual
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Measurement of the day
Ottoman dunam (Palestine reference)
A change of government literally changed the land unit: Ottoman Palestine used a dunam of about 919.3 m², while the British Mandate replaced it in 1928 with the 1,000 m² metric dunam.
One Ottoman dunam (Palestine reference) is understood to be about 919.3 square metres.
Read the record →- Dimension
- area
- Region
- Europe
- Era
- Historical
- Certainty
- Historically documented
approx.
Everyday scale
A regular Crayola crayon is 3⅝ inches long.
That's a regular-size Crayola crayon — a little over 9 centimetres, and a handy rough mental ruler.
Disagreement
Where humans could not agree
A cubit is not a cubit. These records refuse to collapse into one number, so the converter asks you to choose a tradition first.
- vitastiSouth Asian traditional · Ancient/medieval textual traditionsvariant
1 vitasti = 12 aṅgulas; a universal centimetre value should not be assigned without choosing an underlying aṅgula reconstruction.
Why historians disagree → - Fournier pointLengthvariant
A 1908 technical reference gives the Fournier point as 0.34875 mm and notes that the system had largely been superseded by Didot; treat the value as a historical convention rather than an exact universal modern standard.
Why historians disagree → - geun — Korean commodity variantsKorea · Traditional/customary; non-legalvariant
Korean dictionary guidance states that one geun corresponds to 600 g for meat or herbal medicine, but 375 g for fruit and vegetables.
Why historians disagree → - cable lengthMaritime historical family · Historical-modernvariant
Cable length is a nautical distance term whose numerical value has varied by country, navy and period.
Why historians disagree → - deben3 documented definitionsvariant
UCL records Old/Middle Kingdom gold deben about 12–14 g and copper deben about 27 g; New Kingdom system used a deben about 91 g divided into 10 qedet/kite.
- Egyptian deben (New Kingdom standard)Ancient Egypt · Ancient
- Egyptian gold deben (Old/Middle Kingdom range)Ancient Egypt · Ancient
- Egyptian copper deben (Old/Middle Kingdom reference)Ancient Egypt · Ancient
- textile hankSpinning / yarn trade · Historical-modernvariant
A hank is a standard length of yarn, but the length depends on the yarn-count system; cotton commonly uses 840 yards, while other trades use different lengths.
Why historians disagree →
Antiquity
Measured before there were standards
Rebuilt from surviving rods, temple walls and market weights — with the uncertainty left in.
ephah
Mesopotamia / Levant · Antiquity
ephah is a volume measurement concept whose value depends on the named historical, regional, textual, or commodity variant.
variantMore from Mesopotamia / Levant →talent (Mesopotamian)
Mesopotamia / Levant · Antiquity
talent (Mesopotamian) is a mass measurement concept whose value depends on the named historical, regional, textual, or commodity variant.
variantMore from Mesopotamia / Levant →Mesopotamian talent (later reference standard)
Mesopotamia / Levant · Antiquity
One Mesopotamian talent (later reference standard) is understood to be about 29.988 kilograms.
approx.More from Mesopotamia / Levant →amphora quadrantal
Ancient Greece / Rome · Antiquity
Metrological amphora standardized near 26.2 L; real transport amphora vessels varied.
approx.More from Ancient Greece / Rome →Early Dynastic Mesopotamian mina (range)
Mesopotamia / Levant · Antiquity
Surviving evidence places one Early Dynastic Mesopotamian mina (range) between 0.55 and 0.68 kilograms. It is recorded as a range because the documented values were not uniform.
rangeMore from Mesopotamia / Levant →Precision
The measurements we stopped arguing about
Fixed by international agreement and constants of nature. Exactly exact.
| cubic kilometre | km³ | Volume | exact |
|---|---|---|---|
| calorie (International Table) | cal_IT | Energy | exact |
| centipoise | cP | Viscosity | exact |
| kilocalorie (thermochemical) | kcal_th | Energy | exact |
| British thermal unit | Btu | Energy | variant |
| Xochicalco dual measurement modules | — | Architectural measurement system | approx.reference-only |
Creativity
Strange & wonderful
Units invented by students, engineers, reindeer herders and jokers — recorded here with the same honesty as the metre.
micromort
Micromorts make very different hazards comparable on the same one-in-a-million risk scale.
Someone actually measured this.
informalpotrzebie
Knuth later recalled that MAD paid him $25 for the piece.
Invented for a joke. Documented anyway.
reference-onlybeard-second
Its name looks singular, but the historically responsible calculator result is plural: users must choose among documented variants rather than receive one universal conversion.
Yes, that is really the name.
variantinformalattoparsec
The Jargon File notes a delightful coincidence: an attoparsec is about an inch, and one attoparsec per microfortnight is about one inch per second.
Yes, that is really the name.
informalSheppey
Sheppey comes from Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff: it is the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque—approximately seven-eighths of a mile.
Invented for a joke. Documented anyway.
approx.informalpyramid inch
This record is included as a lesson in measurement history: a claim can be historically interesting without being scientifically valid.
Invented for a joke. Documented anyway.
discreditedSagan
Despite later jokes that try to assign it a number, the hacker Jargon File defines a sagan simply as 'a large quantity of anything'—a deliberately fuzzy tribute to Carl Sagan's cosmic-scale rhetoric.
Yes, that is really the name.
informalreference-onlyEvery measurement humans have agreed on — and the ones they never did.
394 approved records and 21 documented ambiguities. Where the evidence is a range, a reconstruction or a disagreement, Scaleidoscope says so instead of rounding history into a single number.
The whole library
394
measurements, sorted by what they physically measure — length, mass, time, and everything humans argued about in between.
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