Elementary arithmetic, with brief notices of its history... by Robert Potts.

2 WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.
In the description of the suburbs to the cities to be assigned to the
Levites in Numb. xxxv. 4, 5, two cubits are referred to, one of which
is double the length of the other. The cubit is stated to be the
distance from the elbow bending inwards to the end of the middle
finger, and called in Deut. iii. 11, " the cubit of a man." The larger
cubit was called "the cubit of the armpit," as being nleasured from
that part of the arm.
It may be presumed from the mention ef the cubit in the later
writings of the Hebrews, and in the writings of other nations, that
the cubit was a measure known and generally recognised by other
people besides those who came out of Egypt under Moses.
In the British Museum there is preserved a measure which was
discovered at Karnak, on the removal of some stones, a few years ago,
from one of the towers of a propylon, between which it appears to
have been accidentally left by the masons at the time of its erection at
the remote period of the eighteenth dynasty (about 1400 B.e.) It is
divided into fourteen parts, but each part is double in length those of
the elephantine, and therefore consists of four digits, and the whole
measure is equal to 41-46 English inches. The double cubit ha-s the
first division in its scale of fourteen parts subdivided into halves, and
the next into quarters, one of these last being equal to one digit. It
is made of larch, and having been closed up in the building between
two stones, excluded from the air, the wood is as sound as when it
was used by the workmen. It is called the cubit of Karnalk.
Herodotus (ii. 13) relates "that the priests told him that, in the
reign of lIeris, whenever the waters of the Nile rose to the height of
eight cubits, all the lands were overflowed, since which time 900 years.
have elapsed, and now (450.ec.), unless the river rise to sixteen, or at
least to fifteen cubits, its waters do not reach those lands." It is
clear froml this account that there was in Egypt a cubit in use, withinl
less than a century after the Exodus of the Hebrews, double of tho
cubit used in Egypt in the age of Herodotus.
Among the artificers employed in the works of the Temple of
Solomon, Hiram is described as the son of a widow of the tribe of
Naphtali, whose territories were adjacent to those of the kingdom of
Tyre, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass. Of this
man it is recorded (1 Kings vii. 15), " He cast two pillars of brass 18
cubits high apiece;'? but in 2 Chron. iii. 15, "He made before the
house two pillars of 35 cubits high." If the words casting in the
former, and?Cmaking in the latter verse, have a difference of meaning,
there is here no contradiction to the fact of one cubit being double the
other.
By a comparison of the measures recorded in 2 Chron. iii. 3, and.
1 Kings vi. 2, of the dimensions of the parts of Solomon's temple,
with the account in Ezra vi. 3, of the rebuilding of the temple, it will
appear that 60 cubits was the height of the latter, but 30 cubits the
height of Solomon's, or that the cubit which describes the dimensions
of the first temple was double of that which describes the second.
After the return of the Jews from Babylon at the end of the
seventy years of captivity, Ezekiel states (ch. xliii. 13): "The cubit
is a cubit and a hand-breadth," from which it would appear that tho
cubit there spoken of was a hand-breadth or a palm longer than
another cubit.
Various opinions have been maintained of the length of those cubits.