How Cubit and Royal Cubit are connected

The strange system the pyramid builders and/or the ancient Egyptians used for measuring has been bothering me for a while. On the one hand, we have the logical divisions of the cubit, into nice 15cm chunks and smaller, while on the other hand we have the royal cubit as π/6 which is a horrible irrational number.

So on the face of it it seems odd that there should be some relationship between a cubit at 0.4500m and a royal cubit at 0.5236+ m. The difference is 0.07356+, and trying ratios does not get us very far.

But my intuition was insisting that there must be some easy connection between the two. So I played around a bit, and noticed that cubit/royal cubit was around 0.8594, which rang a bell, as 0.5236 x phi is 0.8472.

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8 Different methods of getting the 10 parts of a cubit

I’ve rearranged the formulas in Cubit parts and more, updated to be sorted by the general method used. This shows the patterns between the different divisions better.

cubit-parts-grouped.pdf

Changelog:
2018-12-16:
Added some formulas for Royal Cubit and Great Span (half royal cubit)
2018-12-18: Added formulas based directly on π, and also √2/π
2019-01-15: Added formulas for “double pole”, standardised a lot of the formulas to use same denominator, to better show link between formula and number of digits, added page for formulas based on e/π∛3, added tau-equivalent formulas to pi page, added inch, and assorted minor tweaks and corrections.

Getting the Royal Cubit with a quadratic equation

While playing around with the calculator, I stumbled onto the very close identity, where ln(4) plus royal cubit is very close to inverse of the royal cubit.

A bit of rearranging of this identity, replacing the royal cubit by x, allows us to solve for x using the high-school quadratic formula, and thus get a very close approximation for the royal cubit… there are five zeroes after the decimal point if we subtract the royal cubit from the answer.

Here’s the maths: (click to enlarge)

Getting the royal cubit from a simple quadratic equation.

The difference between x above and ₢ (as π/6) comes out at -0.00000727677051.

All about 8.4

As previously shown (here and here), φe/8.4 is a good approximation (0.5236) for the Royal Cubit.

But, you may ask, what’s so special about 8.4?

Well the 8.4 is actually the simplified version of the numbers that came out when deriving the relationship. But we can go in the other direction as well, and explode 8.4 into various components and equivalent fractions.

8.4 formulas

We can do some exposition as follows:

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The Nautical Mile

The nautical mile has a chequered history. The basic idea was to have it set to one degree of arc of the circumference, but that depends on what latitude you are at. You can read Wiki’s take for some background.

Anyway, yes, that royal cubit can be related to a good approximation of the nautical mile, given that the exact definition has varied over time. It’s currently “defined” at 1852 metres.

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Cubit parts and more, updated

[Note: for older version and discussion, see No body parts were harmed producing this post. ]
[Note 2: for newer version, see 5 Different methods of getting the 10 parts of a cubit. ]

[Changelog:
2018-11-26:
My gut had been insisting for a long time that there was another formula involving pi, phi and e involved with these cubit parts, and eventually today I found it. Not only is it incredibly simple (in basic form) but also incredibly accurate. The basic form is simply (phi x e)/pi = φe/π, which comes out at 1.400013584. If we divide this by 7, we get 0.2000 m, and from that can scale to 0.3000 m, and from that, to the other subdivisions. Have updated the formulas in the PDF attached. I’m particularly chuffed with the formula for the foot…. 🙂
2018-11-30: Added formulas based on √(π²+φ²)/e
2018-12-02: Added formulas for great span and remen based on φπ/e construction.]

While playing around with my calculator in recent times, manipulating pi, phi, e, and the cubit e.t.c., I sometimes ended up with an answer of 1.199981615 which is extremely close to 1.2, and I thought that was interesting. Eventually I took note of the formula to get there, and then realised that 1.2 m is 4 Egyptian feet … and then the penny dropped.

From the foot, we can double to the pole, or half to the double handbreadth. A bit of playing around revealed reasonably easy adjustments to give other fractions of the cubit, all based off the same ratio, which is simply pi over (phi squared)  = π/φ².

So here’s an updated list of cubit parts, plus some other measurements like assorted feet, in PDF form. Posting screengrabs from LibreOffice Math is getting tedious 🙂

cubit-parts.pdf

No body parts were harmed producing this post

[Note: the formulas below have been superseded by Cubit parts and more, updated ]

It is the mainstream academic consensus that ancient people based their measurements on body parts. As discussed in Some thoughts on the cubit (and foot) , I don’t think that’s necessarily so, despite at least two (the Persian and Roman feet) at one point being based on the length of the foot of their leader (or his over-sized statue).

I still think the names that these measurements became known as (cubit, foot, palm, etc) were backnyms to create a easy-to-use-and-remember name for a length.

Even something simple like measuring the width of a hand is not exact because fingers move, flesh compresses, etc., and fingers are not all the same width.

So… here’s a little exercise to show that we can get the same list of parts of the cubit just with maths. In some cases two different methods produce values on either side of the target.

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Egyptians being annoying again

Was playing around with the calculator, still exploring exactly what that kink in the alignment of the three pyramids is.

The great pyramid has a designed height of 280 cubits.

The second pyramid has a designed height of 274 cubits.

That’s a difference of 6 cubits. Which is not very interesting until we turn that difference into metres (and you may guess where this is going …)

6 cubits = 6 x π/6 metres = π metres = 3.1415926+ metres ….

Am still pondering difference in height to the third pyramid …. nothing jumping out like π at the moment….