Being Bemphites

For those readers who do not know what a bemphite was, think of them as pacers from the time of Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC), king of Macedon. He created one of the largest empires in history, stretching all the way from Greece to northwestern India (over 6000 kms).

Beside his many thousand infantrymen and cavalry, Alexander took several bemphites in his military campaigns. Their job was to measure the distance they travelled. They did this by counting the number of steps they had taken. It took a year or more of training to standardise their pace-length to 75 cms. So a double pace was 1.5 metres and 1000 double paces defined a mile.

Four friends and I spent a weekend trying to standardise our strides to 75 cm across the grass of e.g Hampstead Heath and got our standard deviation down to about 2 centimeters, quite an achievement we thought. But that was on the level, going up hills and down dales varied a bit more :-(

The next part was also hard. Count up to 1000 double strides, without error, neither omitting nor duplicating a number. Easy, you think? NO!!! Arabic numerals had not been invented by 336 BC, so we had to count in ancient Greek, without making a mistake. Ancient Greek (Attic) numerals were like a fore-runner of Roman numerals, so no positional notation.

Attic numerals came into use perhaps in the 7th century BC. They were acrophonic, derived (after the initial heta=one) from the first letters of the names of the numbers represented. They ran 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 to 1000, written as 1 (heta), P (pente), D (deka), hangman sign (deka in pente), and H (hekaton), heka in pente, to X for 1000. So e.g. 49 is DDDDPIIII. Try saying that out loud (dekedekadekadekapentehetahetahetaheta) while you are concentrating on maintaining your stride length! Do not slow down or confuse the Heta with rough breathing ;-) I found it very hard to do both at once.

Plus we got interrupted by strangers asking what we were doing and asking what language we were all talking (Ancient Greek numbers) ;-)

At our demo, I lost count thrice but was saved by my 4 fellow Bemphites who reset me, as I did for them elsewhere. Crazy things we did as young students.

Geeky, educational, fun ;-)

Comments(6)
Cop Car wrote " You went through an interesting and challenging exercise, Stu. At your size, you probably found it more of a challenge than most to shorten your pace to match the standard length set by the ancients. Not as interesting but of more practical use was the exercise that we students did in a plane surveying course. That course was required of every student who intended to get a degree from the school, and I took it during my first semester (Sept 1955). Our first day of class, we hit the street on which a surveyed mile had been established and counted our steps traversing the distance in either direction in order to establish, each of us, our own pace length. Thankfully, we were not required to count as you and the ancient Greeks counted." Did you do it least 5 times to get your standard deviation too?
Cop Car replied " No, Stu, this was a practical exercise. If we wanted more accurate measurements than our paces gave us, we used a chain. We did have to correct lengths that we obtained with a chain for temperature effects. Our notes were required to be taken in 7H pencil without erasures (to be presented to the legal system – in court, perhaps) and a ridiculous number of decimal places were required to be carried. (I no longer recall how many nor do I have my surveying notes.)" We were taught always to provide an error estimate for any measurement made.
Schorsch (D) wrote " OT: You are mentioned in the HNF blog today again! " The price of fame, man ;-)
Ed (USA) complained "You are using highbrow words I had to look up again : bemphites, attic, acrophonic, thrice. Keep it simpler please." I´ll try :-)
Jenny (Ibiza) echoed Ed "What Ed said" I´m (very) trying ;-)
Billions of Versions... wrote " I laughing at the comments. I'm right there with them."Wilco.

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