Hi fmetrol,
no, this is innaccurate information that comes from 19th century scholarship, and in my first post I was already trying to counter this information, as it seems to be ingrained in the subject, yet is not based on material cultural or historical evidence from Egypt.
I wrote:
"As for the phrase 'standard cubit', I don't think that's a useful term.
The Egyptian cubit was always 28 parts until the 26th dynasty reforms, and the understanding that there was a shorter one or common was not a reality. There was a 6 palm by 6 palm grid used for artwork, and short 6 palm rode have been found that are probably related to this, but this didn't constitute a separate measurement system.
The cubit and bird sign on the 6th palm rather means '1 palm short of a cubit'."
And your term 'common cubit' would more accurately fall under this as well.
The use of terms common and royal goes back to the 19th century, when there was a lot of discussion surrounding the biblical cubits so that the ideologically driven temple of Jerusalem could be rebuilt properly, and there were lots of dilletante aristocrats who started a fad of building their country house piles in Royal Cubits as well - would you believe it?
As for the 52.35cm, 20.6", this is the length of the forearm of a person abou 1m93 or 6'4", and it's quite possible there were people of this height occassionally in dynastic Egypt.
They were not stunted or short of good food and many people from farther south are tall.
When I was at the winter palace hotel recently one of the Egyptian waiters was at least 6'7", which made me think that there is not really a problem regarding the RC as an anthropometric measure assuming the Royal was based on the maximum length observed.
More likely though is that it was based on an arbitary precursor measure that was already in use, or it was built up from palms and was not actually related to any particular forearm.
Anthropometry is always a worrying subject given its dodgy history though, and you can see that ideas of 'royal and common' = 'tall and short' are already ingrained in that subject. The subject was one of the favourites of the Aryan theorists, and as we all know, Aryan was the Sanskrit word for aristocract, and the whole subject was steeped with class snobbery and racism.
Dave Light.
