Особености на предметричните европейски мерки. Опит за историко-метрологичен анализ
Characteristics of the European Measures of the Pre-metric Period. An Attempt at Historical-Metrological Analysis

Summary/Abstract: When studying the European measures of the pre-metric period, one comes across archaic measures of length, square units of area, quantity, and weight that remain, more or less, unknown to modern scholars. The choice of a wrong approach to the conversion of these measures into their metric equivalents may lead to wrong estimates of the quantitative information relevant to the legal, ethnographic, technological and — above all — economic history of a certain area, or time period. In the non-metric systems, the same measure unit may be assigned two, or more, different values in the different regions where it is used. Sometimes, the value assigned to a certain measure unit in one region may be two, or even three, times as high as the value assigned to it in another region. To make things worse, there are cases when the different ethnoses living within the confines of the same region use different names for the same measure unit with the same value. The present article deals with the continuous use of some measure units and their over long periods of time. In certain regions in the world, the same measures have been used for centuries on end without changing their original values. As has been shown by the author of the article, some measures have been continuously used in Europe (including the Balkans) as well as in Western Africa and India for hundreds of years.

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