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Rope stretcher

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File:3kr.jpg

Stretching the rope

In ancient Egypt Rope stretchers were surveyors who measured out the sides of fields 3ht using knotted cords which they stretched in order to take the sag out of the rope and keep the 3ht measures uniform. As far back as the palettes of Narmer and the Scorpion King the Egyptians document the process the royal surveyors used to restore the boundaries of fields after each innundation or flood.

to survey the fields

Narmer and the Scorpion King portray themselves controlling the land through their control of the water that irrigates the land. On the Narmer palette Horus assists Narmer by opening the ways of 3kr the personified god of the land itself shown in the image to the right as a man with a field growing out of his head.

The Narmer pose () is a man striding forward with raised mace toward a subservient subject, which in this case is labled st3t or a field whose kht is 100 royal cubits.

1 khet = 1 side of an 3ht of length 100 cubits
1 st3t = a field of side 100 royal cubits.

"Of the officials, some are market commissioners, others are city commissioners and others are in charge of the soldiers. Among these, the first keep the rivers improved and the land remeasured, as in Egypt, and inspect the closed canals from which the water is distributed into the conduits, in order that all may have an equal use of it. The same men also have charge of the hunters and are authorized to reward or punish those who deserve either. They also collect the taxes and superintend the crafts connected with the land -- those of wood-cutters, carpenters, workers in brass, and miners. And they make roads, and at every ten stadia place pillars showing the by-roads and the distances. Strabo. "The Geography"

Many people think the Romans invented the idea of the milestone but here we can see that it may have originated as a benchmark used by rope stretchers to reastablish the metes and bounds of fields after all other references had been washed away by flood.

The idea of surveying fields using benchmarks would be to establish them along a baseline so that from any one a bearing could be taken and a distance measured out to the place where the next should be. Baselines could be laid out by sighting on the sun or stars, Very likely this would be accomplished by the use of mekhert and bey the Egyptian sighting instruments which preceeded the Greek Dioptra and Roman Groma. The Egyptians also used hayt of ten cubits which were very similar to what modern surveyors call stadia rods and served the same purpose. The Egyptians also used the plumet and 3 - 4 - 5 triangles which are still in use by modern surveyors. The plumet can be used with a square ruled off into intervals on tounge and blade to get a unit rise and run or angle when taking an elevation to a distant point as with a modern sextant.

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  • "The knowledge of pleasing proportions of the rope stretchers was incorporated by the Greeks"
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