Credited to Pakistan. The weight system was used across the whole Indus civilization, which also covered parts of present-day India and Afghanistan. Its exact place of origin is not known; the major excavated series come from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan.
How it began
The Indus civilization was in its mature form from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, and its two great cities, Harappa in Punjab and Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, lie in present-day Pakistan. Excavations at Harappa recovered sets of cubical weights that conform to one standard used in all the settlements. Britannica records that the Harappans employed regular systems of weights and measures.
How it works
The weights are well-formed cubes of chert. Britannica gives the unit as 0.8565 grams. The lower denominations double each time, in the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64, and the larger weights follow decimal multiples such as 160, 200, 320 and 640. The most common weight is about 13.7 grams, the sixteenth ratio. In the series from Harappa the largest weight is 100 times the weight of the largest in the binary set.
What changed first
A single standard across many towns meant that goods could be weighed the same way wherever they were traded. Harappa.com, drawing on the work of the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, suggests that the weights were likely used to regulate trade and to collect taxes.
What lasted
The weights are among the main evidence that the Indus cities shared common rules over a very large area. Researchers note that the system could not have worked unless the weights were highly standardized, from less than one gram upward. Graduated sets of the cubes from Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Allahdino are studied and displayed as examples of early metrology. The analysis of the binary and decimal series reported by Britannica is still the standard description of the system.
