The word Milion is the Roman term for the Greek Milos and is mentioned in Mathew 5. The Greeks derived their systemized standards of measure from a variety of sources including Ancient Europe, Mesopotamia, Persia, Phoenicia and Egypt.
The credit for the first systemized collection and standardization probably goes to the empire builders of Mesopotamia and Egypt but the international commerce of the people who benefited by those great empires, the Greeks and Persians and the Romans who followed them is what really required the system be standardized over such vast areas.
The Mesopotamians measured their arable land in garden plots or sar and combined them into fields or iku of 100 cubits to a side. The Egyptians measured out the irrigation ditches that bounded their 3ht or fields as strips a cubit wide and 100 cubits long known as kht. Their st3t which was a field 100 cubits to a side became the Greek [[]]Aroura.
It is probable that farmers measured out the land their community allowed them to plow in return for digging the ditch by pacing it off and built up an enclosure for it with the stones they found in their furrows.
The community would give the fields out in pairs, one to be plowed and one to remain fallow which were planted in rotation. As beasts of burden were domesticated and yoked to the plow the amount of land under cultivation increased, and a third field was added to be planted in hay or fodder for the plow animal. The side of this cluster of fields became standardized at 350 cubits or one minute of march.
The Milos was based on a stadion equivalent to the Egyptian minute of march.
In Egypt the minute of march was 350 royal cubits long and an hour of march or itrw was 21,000 royal cubits long. The Greeks tell us they noted their measures of 6 plethrons and 8 stadions, were both the equivalent of the Apothem or slant side of the Great Pyramid.
Using unit measures like the Stadion, Stadium and Furlong which were originally used to lay out fields and only gradually became defined as areas like the Aroura or thousand square royal cubits, the empire builders measured out their roads.
The Greek Milos was originally 8 stadions or 600 Greek pous = 4800 pous. The Pous came in long, short, and median variations so depending on which one you used the number of pous would vary even as the length of the stadion and Milos remained the same. 600 Attic pous were equal to 625 Ionian pous but both stadions were 185 meters long.
The Romans standard pes was the Ionian pous of 296 mm so they made their stadium of 185 meters equal to 625 pes or 1000 passus and that made their Milliare 5000 pes.
What makes that a great system for empire builders is that the passus is now a measure of the pace at which the army moves. If such standards of measure are well suited to controlling the movements of armies with milestones related to how much distance can be covered in a set period of time they are equally servicable to the needs of commerce.
Just as the farmer can use the stone walls that border his field to help him restablish its boundaries after a flood, the community can establish its bounds in terms of how much land it needs to irrigate to sustain its population and the lugal or narmr (chief farmer) can determine how many men he needs to dig the irrigation system and how much land to alot to each oinkos, [[gene] and phratre in return for their service. It's all very feudal. The city state is based on a market, souk, emporia or agora that serves a number of communities which are spaced about as far apart as a man can walk in a day driving a team of oxen pulling a cart.
The Million or Mile originated as a division of a degree into a number of stadia, usually eight and tended to standardize earlier definitions of a degree of 111 km in terms of from 400 to 800 stadia all of which were not divided into feet of the same size but could be pous, pes, remen, cubits, royal cubits nibw and even yards paces and orquiya or fathoms.
For purposes of this discussion a foot (plural: feet , anciently fot or fod, (AKA nisu, pes, pied, pous, bd) is a part of a collection of a non-SI units of distance or length different from a remen, nibw, cubit, yard or pace.
In a modern English foot there are twelve inches in one foot and three feet in one yard. Closely related to and sometimes mistaken for the foot are the remen of 15 inches which is the diagonal of a triangle formed with one side a quarter of 9", and another side a foot of 12" and the aln, elle or ni bw of 2 feet.
The standardization of weights and measures has left several different standard foot measures. The most commonly used feet today are based on historical feet that go back to the chalcolithic.
Typically a foot will differ from other measures of length in being divided into a number of fingers, palms, hands and or thumbs or inches in the foot range as opposed to being a span, cubit or remen.
There are three different types of foot.
- 1. The first type measures 4 palms and 16 fingers
- 2. The second type measures 3 hands and 15 fingers.
- 3. A third type 12 thumbs or inches and 4 palms and 3 hands.
Feet vary in length.
- 1 Roman pes = 296 mm
- 1 Egyptian palm based bd = 300 mm
- 1 Mesopotamian hand based nisu = 300 mm
- 1 short Attic Greek foot = 308.4 mm,
- 1 median Athenian Greek foot = 316 mm
- 1 long Greek foot of 18 fingers or 16 thumbs measures 346.96 mm
When used as the length that defines an area feet are squared When used as the length that defines a volume feet are cubed When converting feet to an equivalent in another unit such as a meter round off error often resulted in discrepancies.
As recently as 1959 there were three different statute feet derived from a decree of Queen Elizabeth in 1593 to include a UK foot a US foot and a survey foot.