Ancient Unit of Mass
- The Attic Greek drachma was a weight of 6 obols, 1⁄100 Greek mina, or about 4.37 grams.
- The Roman drachma was a weight of 1⁄96 Roman pounds, or about 3.41 grams.
The Ottoman dirhem was based on the Sassanian drachm, which was itself based on the Roman dram/drachm. Modern Armenian drams, the currency of the Republic of Armenia, share this origin.
Read more about this topic: Dram (unit)
Famous quotes containing the words ancient, unit and/or mass:
“Only the sound remains,
the distant thump of the good elephants,
the voice of the ancient lions
and how the bells
trembled for the flying man.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.”
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913)