Schoenus

Schoenus (Latin: schœnus; Greek: σχοίνος, schoinos, lit. "rush rope"; Ancient Egyptian: i͗trw, lit. "river-measure") was an ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman unit of length and area based on the knotted cords first used in Egyptian surveying.



Schoenus
in hieroglyphs

Length

The Greeks, who adopted it from the Egyptians, generally considered the schoinos equal to 40 stades. But neither the schoinos nor the stadion had an absolute value, and there were several regional variants of each. Strabo (XV,I,II) noted that it also varied with terrain, and that when he "ascended the hills, the measures of these schoeni were not everywhere uniform, so that the same number sometimes designated a greater, sometimes a less actual extent of road, a variation which dates from the earliest time and exists in our days."Herodotus (2.6 and 2.149) says, that schoenus is 60 stadia or about 10.5 kilometres (6.5 mi).[1] This agrees with the distance implied by the Triacontaschoenus stretching south of the First Cataract in Roman-era Nubia.[2] Pliny the Elder 5.11 that is 30 stadia. Strabo 17.1.24: according to the place, between 30 and 120 stadia. Isidore of Charax's schoenus—used in his Parthian Stations—has been given values between 4.7 and 5.5 kilometers, but the precise value remains controversial given the known errors in some of his distances.[3][4]

The Byzantine schoinion or "little schoenus" (σχοινιον, skhoinion) was 20000 Greek feet or 33⅓ stades.[5]

Area

The Romans also used the schoenus as a unit of area, equivalent to the actus quadratus or half-jugerum (2523 m²) formed by a square with sides of 120 Roman feet.[6] The Heraclean Tables admonished that each schoenus should be planted with 4 olive trees and some grape vines, upon penalty of fines.[6]

gollark: > "nice editor" sounds good. for instanceI mostly just mean that it will, for instance, keep your current indentation/list level if you add a newline. I can't think of much other useful stuff, markdown is simple enough.> it'd be cool to have a way to embed links to other notes a way that's as easy as adding a tenor gif to a discord messageYou can, it's just `[[link text:note name]]` or `[[note name]]` if they're both the same. "Nice editor" may include something which shows fuzzy matches > sematic taggingI thought about tagging but realized that "bidirectional links" were *basically* the same thing; if you put `[[bees]]` into a document, then the `Bees` page has a link back to it.
gollark: Δy/Δx, if you prefer.
gollark: The slope of the line.
gollark: Ah, so if two adjacent things are the same and both extrema it wants the midpoint?
gollark: If they mean approximately the same things as in the calculus I did, then if the gradient was positive/negative on one side and the same sign on the other it would not be a maximum/minimum but just an inflection point. But if the gradient changes sign, then it can be, and this probably requires a different value to on either side. But I don't really get what they're saying either.

See also

References


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