Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World

Th e jian was a straight sword. Th e earliest jian date to the sixth century b.c.e. Th is weapon was most popular during the Zho ...

in the Early Iron Age (beginning in 1000 b.c.e.). While some elaborately decorated daggers were apparently intended only for cer ...

GREECE BY CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL Th e wall and vase paintings from the Minoan and Myce- naean Bronze Age, during the second mille ...

lengths for the diff erent ranks. Th e longest of these spears measured 17 feet and had a leaf-shaped iron tip, a change from th ...

to strengthen the shield and to aid in warding off blows. Th is type of shield fi rst appeared in Italy in the mid-eighth cen- t ...

THE AMERICAS BY J. J. GEORGE Th e principal weapons used by ancient indigenous North Americans were the spear-thrower, or atlatl ...

Cerro de las Mesas indicates that warfare was critical in the development and downfall of classic Mayan civilization. Weaponry p ...

counting emerged because people had to weigh and measure. Systems of mathematics provided people with common units of measuremen ...

Longer distances were probably measured by human ac- tivities. Th us, for example, distances corresponding to mod- ern miles wer ...

20,000 cubits (6.5 miles) and was used to measure land dis- tances, originally representing the length of a day’s towing of a bo ...

talent was equal to 3,000 shekels instead of the 2,600 shekels of the Mesopotamian talent. Ancient Mesopotamians measured volume ...

China may have developed systems of weights and mea- sures around the same time as the Indus Valley civilizations. According to ...

Some historians argue that the standards of weights and measures used in ancient Europe, as well as around the Mediterranean Sea ...

or an inch; 4 inches were regarded as 1 bas, or hand palm; 3 palms were a troigid, or foot; 12 troigids were a fertach, or rod; ...

héktos (1⁄6 of the pléthron). A diff erent measure introduced to Athens from Sicily and Cyrenaica was called médimnos, and it re ...

around a Greek racing stadium. It was equal to 625 Roman feet, ⅛ of a Roman mile. Romans measured weight in a unit called a libr ...

Th ey may have formed weights and measures of their own, but it seems unlikely that they did. Cultures that might have had weigh ...

Pierre Grandet, “Weights and Measures.” In Th e Oxford Encyclo- pedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, ed. Donald B. Redford (Oxford: O ...

texts on stone and brick walls. Th ese texts represent the old- est-known Meroitic hieroglyphs, which were adapted from Egyptian ...

be represented by its own phonogram. Th e group of phono- grams in the language is called the alphabet. But hieroglyphic writing ...