Ancient Egypt had very many volume measures for food, drinks, and grains. A common volume measure was a hin, approximately 480 milliliters, and its larger counterpart, hekat, approximately 4.8 liters. In other words, the hekat was ten times the hin. A still larger measure was the deni, which was approximately thirty times the hekat, or 144 liters. The deni began to be used in New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1600 BCE and later), whereas the hin and the hekat existed even during the Old Kingdom, prior to 2000 BCE.¹
The deni was a volume measure derived from the cubit. There are two ways to derive a volume measure from a linear measure — in fact, there are many ways, but two are quite common. One is to derive a volume measure based on a cube, that is, a cubic box of one cubit length, width and height. The royal cubit of ancient Egypt was approximately 52.3 cm. A cubic cubit based on this royal cubit as a linear measure has a volume of approximately 144 liters, corresponding to the deni.
The volume measure may be based on a sphere too. One such volume measure is a sphere having a cubit for the linear circumference around its equator. This measure would have been attractive in the ancient world, because it is easy to verify for round jugs. Just wrap a string measuring a cubit around the largest part of the jug, and if the ends touch, the jug has the desired volume. Based on the royal cubit as a linear measure, this volume is approximately 2.4 liters, or conveniently, half the hekat. Thus, we can conclude that both the deni and the hekat were likely derived from the Egyptian royal cubit.²
The half-hekat of 2.4 liters was a standard volume measure in Old Kingdom Egypt as corroborated from tomb inscriptions and jars from archeological digs dating to ca. 2200 BCE — 1800 BCE.³ These jars, called dew (alternatively chew), were used as daily rations for food or beer in ancient Egypt.⁴ Other contemporary cultures used this measure too, it seems. An approximate multiple of this volume, namely 250 liters, was called kurru in Mesopotamia. Another Mesopotamian measure called dd was probably linked to the Egyptian dew.⁵ This sort of standardization in measures among contemporaneous cultures is to be expected, because of their mutual trade relations.
What is interesting is that they are also relevant to volume measures once used in Kerala before the British and metric systems came along. One such volume measure was the idangazhi ഇടങ്ങഴി, also called changazhi ചങ്ങഴി, which does not have a straightforward correspondence to the metric system. Different sources give different metric values for the idangazhi.⁶ Nevertheless, a rough estimate from different sources suggests that the idangazhi may have ranged between one to one-and-half liters in volume. Gundert’s 1872 Malayalam Dictionary gives a measure of the idangazhi in terms of fingers: a cylinder with a height of 2¼ fingers and diameter of 5½ fingers.⁷ But the fingers themselves have different metric values depending on the scale. For example, we know that 24 fingers make a muzham; Kerala had two different muzham-a small one around 42.75 cm and a large one around 72 cm. Based on the finger from the small muzham, a cylindrical volume with finger measurements per Gundert yields a volume of less than half a liter, which is far off the mark. On the other hand, the finger from the large muzham yields a volume of 1.44 liters, which seems to be in the ballpark.
This last value is riveting, because not only is it in the ballpark, but it is also exactly one-hundredth the Egyptian deni, one-third the Egyptian hekat, and three times the Egyptian hin. In addition, Kerala had a larger volume measure called a para പറ, which was ten times the idangazhi. This ratio of one to ten is the same as the Egyptian hin to hekat ratio. The para was approximately 14.4 liters, which was one-tenth the Egyptian deni, three times the Egyptian hekat, and thirty times the Egyptian hin.
But wait a minute. Could this be merely a coincidence? The Old Kingdom used the long cubit that ultimately survived in Kerala, but not in Egypt. A hypothetical hin based on the long cubit of 72 cm yields a volume of 1.3 liters, which is in the ballpark of Kerala’s idangazhi.⁸ The hekat and para would follow too, with the one-to-ten ratio. In other words, it is very much possible that the Kerala para is actually the Old Kingdom Egyptian hekat! In addition, a much larger volume measure of 300 hekat was used during the Old Kingdom specifically for grain measurements. Indeed, this 300 hekat grain measure makes its appearance in Kerala in the form of munnooru parakandam മുന്നൂറു പറക്കണ്ടം a field which requires 300 para of seed, a standard area measure in ancient times.⁹
However, researchers are adamant that the hin was always 0.48 liters even during the Old Kingdom and never 1.3 liters.¹⁰ So where is this correlation between Old Kingdom measures and ancient Kerala measures coming from? Remember that Old Kingdom Egypt and contemporaneous Mesopotamia used the dew (or chew) measure for volumes rather than the New Kingdom deni? The dew measured around 2.4 liters. Half of this value correlates roughly to the hypothetical hin derived from the long cubit. In ancient Egyptian, the word for “half” was ges.¹¹ Thus, half the dew (or chew) would be called ges-dew (or ges-chew), which corresponds to Malayalam idangazhi (or changazhi), with the transposition of prefix and suffix, and change of [w] to nasal [n] and [s] to [zh]. Given both the numerical and the linguistic connections, it seems likely that Kerala’s volume measures derived from Old Kingdom Egyptian volume measures (and ratios) based on the dew and the long cubit.
This remarkable correlation suggests an interesting historical nugget. The finger-based standard of the idangazhi is clearly arbitrary — who would decide such a strange standard measure with fractional finger widths? It was more likely back filled from the original volume measure and the long cubit that arrived in Kerala from Egypt before 2000 BCE and survived for more than four thousand years to the present day!
Notes
[1] Antoine Pierre Hirsch, 2013, “Ancient Egyptian Cubits — Origin and Evolution,” 4, Doctoral Thesis, University of Toronto. See also 𓉔𓈖𓏌𓅱𓏊, hin, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/98700; 𓋾𓈎𓏏𓌽, hekat, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/110440; 𓂧𓈖𓇋𓏏𓎅, deni, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/179820.
[2] There is other evidence that shows the hekat was derived from the royal cubit. The hin is the cubic palm, the palm being 1/7 of the royal cubit. The hekat is ten times the hin. In yet another calculation, the hin is defined backwards from deni as 300 hin make a deni. See Hirsch, 79–80, 124.
[3] Hirsch, “Ancient Egyptian Cubits,” 70.
[4] Elena Zapassky, Yuval Gadot, Israel Finkelstein, and Itzhak Benenson, “An Ancient Relation between Units of Length and Volume Based on a Sphere,” PLoS ONE 7(3): e33895. See also https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/181290; 𓈋𓏏𓎸, chew, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/450473.
[5] Hirsch, “Ancient Egyptian Cubits,” 71–72.
[6] To make matters even more confusing, the idangazhi was used as a measure of weight also, essentially for paddy.
[7] Herman Gundert, 1872, Malayalam and English Dictionary, 102 (Mangalore: C. Stolz).
[8] A sphere having an equatorial circumference equal to the long cubit of 72 cm will measure half a hypothetical hekat. The hypothetical hekat thus comes out to be approximately 12.6 liters. One-tenth of this hypothetical hekat is the hypothetical hin.
[9] Gundert, Malayalam and English Dictionary, 627.
[10] Hirsch, “Ancient Egyptian Cubits,” 127.
[11] 𓐝𓏤, gs, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/168260.
