Measure Ma’an

Each be ruled by his own.

Here in Jalal­abad, wood is ruled by a ma’an (my spelling, try­ing to capu­ture the pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Else­where it is spelled mann.)

Most of the heat­ing and cook­ing ener­gy needs in Afghanistan are sup­plied by wood. Along the road you see plen­ty of shacks of the wood deal­ers.  Today we stopped by.  Typ­i­cal­ly kids are chop­ping wood while an old­er beard­ed pro­pri­a­tor (father/uncle) is sip­ping tea and wait­ing for customers.

I noticed our wood was being weighed on a scale, but instead of weights, it was coun­ter­bal­anced by cal­i­brat­ed rocks. The unit of mea­sure is a ma’an, which varies local­ly but approx­i­mates 7 kilos.

A ma’an is the pref­ered unit of mea­sure for wood, and is part of a com­pre­hen­sive unit scale:

.
.
.		ma’an	SI	Typ­i­cal Items
.
.	1 khar­war	80	560 kg	wheat chaff, scrap metal
.
.	nim khar­war	40	280 kg
.
.	1 ma’an	-	7 kg	wood, rice
.
.	nim­ma’an	1/2 ma’an	3.5 kg
.
.	charak	1/4 ma’an	1.25 kg	car­rots, onions
.
.	nim charak	1/8 ma’an	625 g
.
.	1 pau	1/16 ma’an	322 g	lemons, peanuts, sug­ar, meat
.
.	nim pau	1/32	219 g
.

.	khord	1/64	109 g	hen­na, chai
.
.	nim khord	1/128	55 g
.
.	pookhtabar	1/256	27 g	herbal med­i­cine
.
.	nim pookhtabar	1/512	14 g
.
.	chi­takai	1/1024	7 g	spices, sur­ma

Accord­ing to wikipedia the ety­mol­o­gy can be traced to the Hebrew word mana, as in mana from the desert. Every day the wan­der­ing tribe that exit­ed Egypt was allowed to col­lect one Omer of mana. On Fri­day, the col­lec­tion was dou­bled, to pro­vi­sion for Sat­ur­day, the Sab­bath day of rest. An omer is a dry weight of mea­sure, approx­i­mate­ly the vol­ume of 3.5 liters of water. On Fri­day there­fore, the col­lec­tion was 7 vol­u­met­ric liters, which would weigh 7 kg (if water).

To con­tin­ue reach­ing for more con­nec­tions, the ma’an weights were made of stone. An impe­r­i­al stone is 6.35kg, not that far off?!

None of this should be con­fused with a ma’an in Pak­istan. A Paki­ma’an is appar­ent­ly 7 times an Afghan ma’an.

Not every­thing is mea­sured using this scale. If for exam­ple you were buy­ing opi­um, then the stan­dard mea­sure is a “kar­tus” defined as the weight of a AK47 bul­let cas­ing, a sen­si­ble stan­dard from those at hand.