Introducing Tholos, an ancient measurements converter (original) (raw)

If you have reached this pages is because, for some reason or another, you have heard about Tholos Converter… If so, welcome! I am very exciting about the release of this app, a personal project I have been thinking about for quite a long time. The premise is very simple: for many of us working on archaeology or ancient texts it is very common to encounter references to ancient measuring systems. This is a topic I have been always curious about, because the way you measure the world determines how you conceive and interpret it. And in ancient times there were many ways of measuring things… That is why I have created Tholos.

Tholos is an app designed for converting to and from different ancient measuring systems. The name derives from the circular structure called Tholos located in the Athenian agora, which, around 500 BCE, contained an official set of weights and measures against which the merchants were required to test their sets. This version includes basic units for measuring length, weight, area, and dry volume for the metric system, the 5th c. BCE Attic system (widely used in Athens and its empire), and the late republic- early empire Roman system (c. 2nd c. BCE to 2nd c. CE).

The idea behind this app is to provide everybody interested in studying antiquity with a simple tool to convert among different standards. Measuring in the past was a political action. It gave the community a sense of autonomy, so in Greece, for example, each polis fought hard to keep their own standards different from those of their neighbors. In time, complex social and political developments tended to unify systems, but researchers in both the literary and archaeological records still encounter a huge variety of measurements that need to be converted to be properly understood. Tholos intends to facilitate that task as much as possible.

The app allows the conversion not only between the metric system and the ancient ones, but among different cultures as well. Hence, Greek stadia can be converted to Roman milia. For this 1.0 version I have taken a series of decisions that, I believe, facilitate the use of the app, but your feedback would be more than welcome. One decision that may seem odd at least is the use of the ancient names instead of the modern anglicized versions. In my research experience the use of latinized or anglicized versions of names, while commonly accepted, present the risk of deleting the identity of the terms they define. Translate podes or pedes as feet may not seem a problem but, how do you translate kotylai? A glossary is included in the app and allows for the translation of all terms and an explanation of their equivalents in metric system. It may seem a little bit annoying at first, I admit, but I think it is important we get used to the proper terminology.

Tholos is a work in development, and although great care has been put in checking, and rechecking, that all conversions are correct, I am sure there are things that can be improved. The aesthetics are for sure an area I need to work more into… I wanted to offer the tool as quickly as possible, but now that it works I should devote some time to improve the visuals. Another aspect that requires some work, this time in the coding department, is the display of measurements as decimals, this is, the result of transforming meters into podes with a string of decimal values rather than podes and daktyloi, but that is going to require writing a more complicated code, and I still need to work on simplifying the present one… the lists of operations look eternal on the screen! Something I will be working on rather soon is in the inclusion of the volume tab for liquids (right now I have coded solids only) and the addition of basic measurements from ancient Egypt.

As an archaeologist a personal interest I have is to use Tholos to find patterns in the sizes and measurements of archaeological finds and structures. In my case, I have done some testing in ceramic analysis, with interesting results. A well-known krater in the MET, and attributed to the Hirschfeld Workshop, measures 108.3 cm tall. Using Tholos, we obtain a result of 3.5 podes. A personal advice based on experience: trust only museum or primary records when working with measurements. It is very common to find in secondary sources, even academic ones, a simplification of the measurements. Thus, it is very common to read that this krater is 110 cm high, an error that then gets in the literature and prevents an accurate analysis of many of these famous vessels.

Geometric krater ca. 750 – 735 BCE Attributed to the Hirschfeld Workshop, MET.

And that is all for now. Thank you for downloading and playing around with the app. Your feedback will be more than welcome! In a system that does not work in the decimal progressions we are used to the number of “intermediate” units is very prolific, and although I have included the most relevant ones, I will keep updating “packages” of the lesser-known units for the measuring systems I have already included in the app. As I said, Tholos is a work in progress, and I intend to improve it as much and as frequently as I can! Tholos will always be available for free. It is a tool for researchers and anybody interested in the study of the past, and I want it to be accessible to everybody. If you want to collaborate with this project, you can buy me a Ko-Fi, but what I really want is to hear about your experiences (good and bad) using the app, so I can keep improving it!