15

Logic II 15

The Kets of Naucratis

mention an incontestable instance of it,incontestible, at least,
by any fair-minded competent to deal with the problem. Prof.
Flinders Petrie, whose reasoning powers I had admired long
before his other great scientific qualities had been proved, among which
his great exactitude and circumspection as a metrologist concerns
us here, exhumed, at the ancient trading town of Naucratis,
no less than 158 balance-weights having the Egyptian ket as their unit. ^*
The great majority of them are of basalt and syenite, material so
unchangeable that the corrections needed to bring them to their original
values are small. I shall deal only with 144 of them from each of which
Mr. Petrie has calculated the value of the ket to a tenth of a Troy
grain. Since these values range all the way from 137 to 152
grains, it is evident that they represent the weights were intended to be copies of several different
standards, probably four or five; for there is would be no use of
weighing a balance, if one can could detect the errors of the balance-weights by
simply half "hefting" them, and comparing them with one's
memory of the standard weight. From what Considering that there

^* Egyptian Exploration Fund. Third Memoir. p.