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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 4311145, member: 93416&quot;]Thanks for asking Steve - at last we are getting to some facts!</p><p><br /></p><p>OK, Petrie went out and personally collected 4,000 ancient weights, mostly from Egypt.&nbsp; Before the days of computers, or even pocket calculators, he figured out a number of different ancient systems of weight, and had a shot at saying what all the standards were, and then, how and why each weight best fitted which standard.&nbsp; Must have taken thousands of calculations by hand, and the results all neatly written up in very accessible summary tables in pen and ink (published 1926 as I recall).</p><p><br /></p><p>Peter Ucho – the guy who masterminded the political coup at the World Archaeology conference in 1986 – got control of the Petrie museum and got all the weights that had been loaned out to the British Museum and the Science Museum returned to the Petrie. He made comments about scholarship not being compatible with commercial collecting, and since (at that time) the BM did collaborate with collectors, it seems he thought it somehow beyond the pale.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyhow he also raised a big grant to put the collection on line. By now it was about 6,000 weights. Cost was about 30K for the weights – the result should be easy enough to find on the web. There is a nice picture of each weight, and generally a measurement of size in cm. But they did not record the actual weight of the weight!</p><p><br /></p><p>The first Englishman to travel to Egypt for scholarship, John Greaves, c. 1640, went there to study ancient weights and measures. Newton studied his results. Petrie followed up on them. The whole deal was exactly about the weight and the weight standards. But nobody at the Petrie seems to have had foggiest idea why they were doing what they were doing. Aside from getting paid that is.</p><p><br /></p><p>As well as not recording the weights, they changed all the accession numbers, and did not record the old Petrie numbers for cross reference. So basically obliterated Petrie’s scholarship, at least as far as the web site goes.</p><p><br /></p><p>What do you think? Clever?</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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