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The measures of the Achaemenid Empire, from the finger to the parasang. Part of the Ancient Measures collection.
Every unit converts through meters. The scale follows the Achaemenid table: digit 0.02, hand 0.10, foot 0.30, cubit 0.50, royal cubit 0.52, pace 1.5, parasang 6000 m. Worked example: the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis, reckoned at 450 parasangs (Hdt. 5.53) = 450 × 6 = 2700 km — Herodotus’s own figure for the courier’s journey. The parasang was a time-unit as much as a distance: the ground an army covers in an hour — so it stretches from ~5 to ~7 km across sources.
About 6 km (3.7 miles) in Achaemenid use — 30 stades by Herodotus’s reckoning (5.53). It was really ‘an hour’s walk’, so ancient figures vary; the 19th-century farsang was 6.23 km, modern Iran’s 10 km.
About 52 cm — the administration’s standard, deliberately close to the Egyptian royal cubit (52.5 cm) the empire inherited. Ordinary cubits ran 50 cm.
They systematized them: Darius’s administration took Babylonian and Egyptian measures, fixed their ratios (5 fingers to the hand, 3 hands to the foot), and ran an empire on them — the Royal Road’s staging posts (stathmoi) were spaced in parasangs.
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