Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/395

 On the Hebrew Cubit. 385 le Greeks employed in land-surveying a rod ten Greek feet or 101 14 Eng. feet long. This measure they called anaiva. The name does not seem to be of Greek etymology ; may it not be derived from the Aramaic mp, and may not the rod have been borrowed from the Babylonians ? If it was adjusted so as to be exactly equal to ten Greek feet, we need not suppose that it agreed exactly in length with the Babylonian rod from which it was borrowed. I have said that the later Hebrew cubit was probably derived from the Babylonians. Herodotus (i. 178) measures the walls of Babylon by royal cubits, which he tells us were 3 finger-breadths greater than the common (Greek) cubit. These royal cubits therefore measured 1707 Eng. feet. They evidently did not differ much from the royal cubits of Egypt. I think it more likely that they were Persian than Babylonian cubits. Babylon, or rather, what remained of it, was in the time of Herodotus under Persian rule : and, as the term pao-ikevs was by the Greeks always applied to the Persian monarch, the term "royal" may have been a mere synonym for " Persian." No argument there- fore can be drawn from these royal cubits of Herodotus as to the length of the later Hebrew cubit. J. F. Thrupp. Adversaria. I. On a passage of Sophocles. In Soph. (Ed. Tyr. 862, the common reading is ovbev yap av Trpaf-aip! av cov ov crol <piov. I strongly suspect that we should read ovdev yap ovv irpd^aip! av, k.t.X. for independently of the exact applicability of the expression yap ovv, I do not see any particular reason in this passage why the av should be repeated at all, to say nothing of its being repeated at so short an interval. In (Ed. Col. 980, this very expression yap ovv is corrupted into yap av in the Vatican Manuscript (see Elmsl. ad 1.)