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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Historical Artifacts
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Just a community for everyone to share artifacts, reconstructions, or replicas for the historically-inclined to admire!
Generally, an artifact should be 100+ years old, but this is a flexible requirement if you find something rare and suitably linked to an era of history, not a strict rule. Anything over 100 is fair game regardless of rarity.
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Sure, but I would think standardization of measurement wouldn't mean much if it was a single person. I guess they could be selling something and perhaps have various amounts. That would seem to be a lot of work for something like that though.
Well no, it's not a single person, but more like a rare person. How many people in the modern world own calibrating weights for scales? I don't, and I'd actually need to calibrate my scales (I just check em with several coins to get more or less a known weight. But have to do several coins so it averages out the dents and dirt the coins might have.)
I'm just saying I don't believe this accuracy is anything that would've been needed by an average citizen. So, not unique objects, but handmade specialised equipment. Probably most towns/cities would have only one or a couples of apothecaries, if any. These apothecaries on the other hand would have to get their specialised equipment either from knowing how to advice a craftsman how to make it, make it themselves, or get them from a bigger city.
I mean you still see the exact type of bottles in pharmacies as decoration. (Well we do here. I've gathered US pharmacies are a bit more... commercial.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apothecaries%27_system#Origin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measurement
I'm thinking they're some of these:
Idk how lemmy will format but the numbers after mean unit, equal to, metric, imperial and US fluid:
acetabulum 1⁄48 congius 68 mL 2.39 fl oz 2.30 fl oz
quartarius 1⁄24 congius 136 mL 4.79 fl oz 4.61 fl oz
hemina or cotyla 1⁄12 congius 273 mL 9.61 fl oz 9.23 fl oz
sextarius 1⁄6 congius 546 mL 19.22 fl oz 0.961 pt 18.47 fl oz 1.153 pt
congius 1 congius 3.27 L 5.75 pt 0.719 gal 3.46 qt 0.864 gal
urna 4 congii 13.1 L 2.88 gal 3.46 gal