Register here - as a registered user you get more features and fewer ads.
'The mean of the Roman foot = 11.67 inches' - Nicholson, 'Man and Measures', 1912, p.49.
We saw how both Petrie and Atkinson measured the same inner diameter of the Stonehenge Sarsen ring at 1168 inches, separated by eight decades in time, (the latter put it at 97 1/3 feet, and taking 4 inches to a foot gives us this value). So, if you accept 'Petrie's Hypothesis' of a decimal system in use, that gives one hundred 11.68 inches. That 'Roman foot' value is now the height of an A4 sheet of paper within a millimetre - so it preexisted the British foot, and has outlasted it!
We saw how the width of the Acropolis and the inner diameter of the sarsen ring at Stonehenge are in a precise 25:24 ratio, as 100 Greek and Roman feet, respectively.
In the Ashmoleum museum at Oxford, there is the 'Arundel' frieze of a man with outstretched arms, measuring 207 cm between his fingertips and a separate 'foot' imprint which is 29.6 cm - clearly, one-seventh of the total span. This came from the island of Samos in the 5th century BC, close to the time of the Acropolis' construction. One regrets that Alexander Thom never stood before this frieze and exclaimed, 'But of course! That is a megalithic rod - comprising seven Roman feet! Aha!'
Wikipedia gives the 'Roman foot' as 296.2mm, and that equals 11.66 inches. It says this is 'The value of the historical Roman foot scientifically obtained through modern statistical methods' - so there! We may have some trouble in believing in what would have to be a central miracle of metrology, that one unit could thus endure down through four millenia...
I think this is what Anne Macaulay was arguing - and why she called it a 'Greek' foot. Okay, one can call it a 'Samian' foot (and Euan Mackie does) because it first appeared there in Samos, but let's here call it 'Roman' and only use the term 'Greek foot' for the 'Olympian' Greek foot of 12.16 feet. We may bear in mind Nicholson's statement that 'There is no trace of the Olympic foot in North Europe' (ibid, p.49).
Thom expressed his MY as 32.64" which puts his MR (5/2 scale factor) as 81.6" or 207 cm - the Arundel frieze arm-length.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road