I’ve always wondered how people measured long ago, before the systems we use now, and today I learned some of the ways of measurement through out time. It was interesting to learn about the cubit, used in Ancient Egypt, and how it was based on the kings forearm length. Measurement wasn’t very specific back then, because one persons cubit could be different from another persons. Now we have the metric system, based on 10’s, and now measurement is very easy for us.
I also learned about some common referents, such as your pinky nail is about 1 cm.
I’ve also always wondered how numbers came to be, because we rely on them for nearly everything we do, and I’ve wondered what it would be like to not have numbers and not be able to measure. I learned that the earliest discovery of numbers were 60 scratches of lines on each side of a bone. Some way of counting would have to be known by this time, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to have an equal number of scratches on each row.
I enjoyed this lesson because we’ve taken measurement and numbers for granted and not really thought about where they started, and this class we got to see the history of them.