Ancient history - How do you deal with common metrics

It's difficult. When I wrote in 500 BC Ireland, I used 'moons' instead of months, and 'winters' instead of years. 'moment' seemed fine, but I avoided minutes, hours, etc. I described the time in relation to the sun - noon, dusk, mid-morning, etc. For distance, I used leagues for distance and hands for short measurements. It's not correct, of course - no English back then! But it could have been used at the time (in translation) and it gives the 'flavor' of another time, at least.

I would prefer to see contemporary (meaning contemporary to the story) vocabulary along with an equally contemporary reference that will help a modern reader interpret.

"It had been twelve candlemarks since the dawn had signaled the beginning of her day. She took only a moment to watch the sky turn red as the sun dipped beneath the waves to the west before she shouldered her bundle again and moved on."

I can guess from this that a "candlemark" is about an hour, and from then on, you can refer to "quarter candlemarks" or "half candlmarks" to measure time. This is, of course, just an example, but I'm sure you can do the same thing with the appropriate measurements for your time period.

Little bit of research should do it.

An official system of weights and measures was established[citation needed] in the ancient Persian Empire under the Achaemenid dynasty (550-350 BCE).

By about 500 BC, Athens had a central depository of official weights and measures,

Ancient Mesopotamian units of measurement originated in the loosely organized city-states of Early Dynastic Sumer.

Measurements were needed for commerce and from the looks of my tiny bit of research, fairly sophisticated by your timeframe.

I quite enjoy such correspondence tables. They add a lovely flavor to the work, especially when it's clear it's done for historical accuracy, not just to be 'different' (like in a high fantasy book where all the measurements are hyphenated with odd characters and apostrophes throughout).

But I'm weird. And an accountant.

ecerberus said:

@maeze - I am aware of that. My problem isn't the existence of measurements, but using them in a way that doesn't require an appendix for the reader. Besides, the measurements for the Greek world would be different from the Persians to the Egyptians. I guess I could have an upfront page, prior to the start of the novel, that introduces the reader to the measurements. I've personally had no issue with such introductions, but wonder if many people will hate it.

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Unless the measure itself is something critical to the story line, I'd use the measurements of the day. The reader will not need a definition. If you read shillings in a story set in the UK and you are unfamiliar with the coin, the reader will still understand the sentence.

Parsecs, intergalactic credits, many moons, fiction uses all sorts of measurement vocabulary without needing to tell the reader what said measurement translates to.

ecerberus said:

@Myrealana - the challenge with that is that the metrics then varied by region, and there's no clean equivalents - so the reader will have a hard time trying to figure out what it meant at all. For e.g. if I said "I will travel 3 stadia" it means nothing to the reader, unless I add an appendix to the novel explaining what it is.

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That's why you add a reference that the reader can gauge from.
"It will take me a full day to walk three stadia, even keeping a double pace." I now have a general idea that it's around 20 miles or so, give or take. Unless it is vitally important to your story that the reader understand the exact measurement (which I doubt it would be), you've given them a scale.

The point isn't to teach them how to measure in Roman, or Persian or Egyptian. It's to maintain the illusion while not sending them off in search of an encyclopedia.

greendragon said:

I quite enjoy such correspondence tables. They add a lovely flavor to the work, especially when it's clear it's done for historical accuracy, not just to be 'different' (like in a high fantasy book where all the measurements are hyphenated with odd characters and apostrophes throughout).

But I'm weird. And an accountant.

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I would not find such a table or key intrusive. Tolkien gave us a map of Middle Earth. I've seen keys in books before.

As long as it wasn't over done: Stephenson's Anathem had an atrocious prologue discussing his terminology. I couldn't get past it.

Myrealana said:

That's why you add a reference that the reader can gauge from.
"It will take me a full day to walk three stadia, even keeping a double pace." Unless the precise meaning of that measurement is important to your story, I now have a general idea that it's around 20 miles or so, give or take.

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This works well.

Yay! We solved the thing!

For something historical, where I was trying to immerse the reader in the pov and perspective of someone living in that time and place, I'd research the units of time, distance, weight etc. they used (and for time, what sort of time measurement they had) and incorporate those terms (or their modern translations) in way that would (hopefully) give the reader a context they could understand. The concept of the hour, year and month (and minutes and seconds too) are older than many people know, but before mechanical time pieces with second hands, I doubt people used "seconds" as a go-to word for small, imprecise measures of time. Maybe "moment" or "heartbeat" would work better, though hours and minutes might still be salient in a world with water clocks, sundials, hourglasses (or less precise mechanical clocks) and so on.

Another approach is to use the "translation" principle, where the story is written in a more modern "voice" with whatever tweaks feel appropriate for the time and place. I feel that this works better with fantasy or historical settings where people would be speaking a completely different language than the reader anyway, but even so, it feels weird to me if the characters sound too modern or if they reference things that wouldn't exist in their world or culture.

If you're using an external (omniscient) narrator, then it might depend on the voice and perspective of that entity. Are they someone from our own time telling the reader about something long ago (or far away) or are they someone from more-or-less the same time and place as the story?

I agree with everything that's been said. I will say that "minutes" used before the invention of the modern clock really pulls me out of a story. I'm less concerned by hours, miles, etc, which have been around forever.

I generally try to just use the local measurements, and I don't really bother with the smaller units of time, they generally wouldn't feature too much I guess. Formal subdivisions of hours are more of a medieval thing, and there wasn't any real way to measure them anyways.

Bit late to the party... but the Persians had their own measurement systems too.

The most common of them all being the day you would march on the Royal / Silk Road. That was a common way of judging distances. The Persians had the Silk Road and travelling through that was the preferred method, hence why it had measurement.

When I'm writing about travelling great distances, my Roman courier will talk in time rather than measurements. So if he has to travel 100 miles, historians know a legionary could march 20 miles a day, so my MC will talk about a journey which lasts 5 days. Of course an experienced courier, with access to fresh horses could travel 50 miles a day.