Weights and Balances in Ancient Egypt

Abstract

IN the study of ancient weights there has been a tendency to broaden the application of inference from comparison of different standards, until it has grown from the attempt to trace the origin of later standards to the modern field of research. The main objectives now are the far-reaching character of international trade and the common basis of exchange at a very early date and a closer linking up of the derived standards of later, and even present, days with the earliest originals. Prof. S. B. K. Glanville, in his Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on “Weights and Balances in Ancient Egypt”, delivered on November 8, 1935, and now available in printed form, while recognising the wider aims of modern metrological studies, confined himself of set purpose to indicating what we are justified in inferring, from the actual contemporary weights and from the pictorial representations of balances, as to the practice of buying and selling in private and public life throughout the dynastic period in Ancient Egypt.