Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler

Sumerian mythology. We have already observed that the first and therefore the most important month of the year was known by the Sumerians as Barag-Zag-Gar. This month commenced on the day of the first full Moon, after the barley harvest. This period of the year could have been sacred to only one deity. Her name was ‘Nisaba’, one of the most important deities in the Sumerian pantheon, and a goddess with very special responsibilities. Nisaba was, first and foremost, the barley goddess. We were intrigued to discover, however, that among her many attributes she was said to be the goddess responsible for:
    ‘The measuring lines to measure the heavens.’ 2
    As we looked more closely at the humble barley seed we were soon to find that it held spectacular properties for the Sumerians. Having looked at the Sumerian civilization in the light of the principles used by the Megalithic builders we could see a clear pattern to their units of length and those of time. We now needed to look at their units of weight and capacity.
Weight and capacity
    When we had deduced possible units of weight and capacity from Megalithic units of length, they had turned out to be the same as modern imperial units. Now we needed to apply the same logic to the Sumerian situation. Because the double-kush was so close to the metre, we did not need a calculator to tell us that if the Sumerians had followed the same route of making a cube with sides one tenth of a double-cubit, they must have been using units almost identical to the kilogram and the litre for weight and volume.
    Unlike the Megalithic situation, contemporary records of Sumerian weights and measures still exist, so all we had to do was to look up the units that are known to have been used some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Despite our previous discoveries, we were nevertheless stunned to learn that the Sumerians/Babylonians had indeed used units that were effectively the half-kilogram and the litre! The Sumerian unit of mass, the ‘mana’, is consistently described by archaeologists as being ‘about half a kilogram’, while the ‘sila’, the basic unit of volume, has been shown to be very close to a litre.
    The double-kush is said to be something very close to 99.88 centimetres in length, so a cube with sides of one-tenth of this would have sides of 9.988 centimetres. The volume of water that such a cube could hold would be 996.4 centilitres, less than 4 centilitres short of a litre of 1,000 centilitres, The sila is therefore equal to the amount of water that would fit into a one-tenth double-kush cube. The weight of the water in such a cube should represent the standard unit of mass. However, the mana weighs around half a kilogram, whereas it is clear that the true weight of one litre of water should be a full kilogram. The Sumerians, like the Megalithic people, regularly used halves and doubles of principal units and we wonder whether the Sumerian texts have been slightly misinterpreted and a mana did originally weigh a kilogram or, more likely, that the Sumerians found this unit cumbersome and so halved it for most day-to-day purposes.
    We found that we were not the first researchers to suggest that the Sumerians used cubes to turn linear length into mass and volume. The late Professor of the History of Science, Livio C. Stecchini, remained convinced all his life that it was obvious that theoretical cubes had been used by the Sumerians to create mass and volume measures from the kush and double-kush. Present orthodoxy disagrees with this premise, preferring to believe that these mass and volume weights were somehow tortuously derived from Sumerian units of area. The general argument against Stecchini’s idea is based upon the fact that no cubes of the right size have ever been found in Sumer. The learned professor dismissed this observation by noting that in the case of the metric system, ‘original units for cubing one-tenth of a metre were, and still are, cylinders and not