Origin of the Ruler (Scale)
The Harappan Civilisation, or Indus Valley Civilisation, is one of the oldest known civilizations. This being said, it does not mean that they were technologically backward. The Harappans knew their way around their surroundings, their world. They could manipulate the natural resources around them to their own use in such a way that they made their lives much easier than we would imagine it to be. One such result of this would be the invention of the ruler or the scale.
In general, the need to measure things does not necessarily require the manipulation of anything, let alone natural resources. We assume that human beings, from the beginning of time, use their body parts to measure things. You can quite easily measure the length of something in accordance with your hands and feet. But this then raises the question of uniformity — everyone has feet and hands of different sizes, so what could be the length of four hands for one may just be three and a half for another. It’s after people realize this mistake that the curiosity comes in to figure out a way to measure things universally.
Coming back to the Harappan Civilisation, dating back exactly to the year 2650 BCE, we will now understand how these extraordinary people decided they wanted to measure length. We must understand that a lot of the towns that existed within the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilisation were booming commercial centers of their time. Commerce suggests that a lot of goods were being exchanged for some kind of money, which then brings us to the fact that the sale of goods requires certain amounts of measurement to ensure the proper sale, right? Thus, this explains the various measuring devices found there by archaeologists who have taken their time studying the remains of the civilisation.
The German archaeologist Eckhard Unger discovered, sometime around thousands of years later, in the AD, the first existing ruler. This ruler was more or less a mere measuring rod crafted out of copper alloy. Measurement artefacts dating centuries after the first measuring tool have also emerged as a result of excavation and extensive research. Evidence of rulers calibrated to lengths of 1.6 milimetres and 0.13 milimetres, respectively, has been found at the archaeological sites of Lothal and Mohenjo-Daro, two major Harappan towns. These rulers were made of ivory.
These rulers were made of metal, or alloy, or any other readily available material there was that could be used. In today’s world, all we see are plastic and metal scales, sometimes wooden. Some scales bend, and some scales come in the form of what we call measuring tape, in rolls because they’re that long. These different versions, of the original copper alloy rulers, which now come universally calibrated, are a result of people’s creativity and curiosity over the years.
While the evolution of rulers lies with the brilliant minds that came in closer to the century in which we live, the origin lies in the Indus Valley Civilisation. Of course, all of these ancient measurement rulers, with their variations, were the result of people’s curiosity, of somebody who didn’t wish to use his or her hands or feet to measure things anymore. Imagine what you could do if you decided to do things in a different way, and used your curiosity to help you in doing so?
Let your curiosity be your guiding factor to changing the world. Take the Curiosity Test here to find out your Curiosity Type.
