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Digit, palm, span, cubit, foot, pace: open any ancient metrology table — Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Russian — and the same body parts stare back. This is no coincidence and no borrowing alone can explain it. The body was simply the measuring instrument everyone carried: always available, roughly constant within a community, and intuitively divisible (four fingers to the palm, six palms to the cubit, almost everywhere).
What varied was not the idea but the authority behind it. A village cubit was the elder’s forearm; a temple cubit was a stone bar in the sanctuary; an imperial cubit was whatever the tax office said. Herodotus already distinguishes the Egyptian royal cubit from the common one (Histories 1.178) — standardization is as old as taxation, because you cannot tax grain in measures the farmer can renegotiate.
Trade did the rest. Every market town that handled foreign merchants needed conversion tables, and every empire that absorbed a neighbor inherited its units — hence the Hebrew mil (the Roman mile) and parsah (the Persian parasang), the Russian arshin (the Persian elbow), the English inch inside Peter the Great’s arshin. The metric system was only the final, global round of a process as old as the bazaar: when trade outgrows the village, measure must outgrow the body.
See the body’s legacy in both directions: the Jewish and Russian length converters.