Inquiry into Measurements

Inquiry into Measurements: The Term Juft as a Surface Area Unit

By Majid Montazer Mahdi, 26 July 2022

 

 

In agrarian societies, land was the main source of wealth. Therefore, it is no surprise that a major part of the documents which have survived from the medieval Islamicate world dealt with land, land tax, and agricultural produce. In this respect, it is critical for us working with the Persian documents from medieval Afghanistan to determine the measures and units used in them. Nevertheless, determining the values of these units is not as easy as one might think, and there are at least two reasons for this.

 

The challenges

  1. Many of the units frequently represent different types. For example, German scholar Walther Hinz, in his seminal treatise on units and measures, Islamische Maβe und Gewichte umgerechnet ins metrische System, listed two different usages for the word “qafīz” –a word that also appears in our Persian documents–as a measure of both volume and surface area (Hinz 1955 48-50 and 66; For English translation, Hinz 2003, 71-74 and 97). But the Iranian scholar Abū al-Ḥasan Diyānat suggests that “qāfiz” is also a unit of weight (Diyānat 1988, 1:341-49). Hinz knew this third meaning but did not distinguish it as an independent weight unit (Hinz 1955, 49). Thus, for example, although qafīz was primarily used as a volume unit, it also refers to the weight of a particular volume of wheat.

  2. The other problem in identifying measurement values is that they differ from place to place and over time. Under qafīz as a unit for volume, Hinz identified different conversion rates for Iraq, Iran, Khwārazm, Palestine/Syria and Maghrib (Hinz 1955, 48-50)! The values of units also changed over time, which illustrates how challenging it is to determine the right conversions of units.

 

The Application: Example from Document “Khalili 38”

In one of the documents I have worked on for the Invisible East programme, which comes from early thirteenth-century Afghanistan, the term “juft” is used to determine the surface area of a plot of land that was subject to a sale. Document 38 of the Khalili Collection of Persian documents states the following:

2022 07 26 persian text

 

 

 

The translation is:

… sold the following, forty jufts of mountainous land in the mountains of village of Istīw, in the region of Chābuk-rāgh which is known as Istanwī-Bayk…

Juft or juft-i gāv (lit. a yoke of oxen) refers to either the area in which a yoke of oxen can furrow during a specific amount of time, or just literally, “a yoke of oxen”. However, we are interested in the former sense. Measuring the surface area (masāḥa) based on the labour needed to furrow land is extraordinary since the labour for preparation could differ drastically based on soil hardness and the oxen’s strength. In addition, the time required to define the labour is essential.

At least three methods for measuring the surface area of agricultural land are recognisable.

  1. First is a method similar to the metric system based on square measures, like jarīb, which was a square unit of a linear distance (Hinz 1955, 65-66).
  2. The second method measures the surface area by relying on the weight or volume of seeds sown (Ṣafarī Āq Qalʿa et al. 2016, 149).
  3. The third method, under which juft should be subsumed, relies on the amount of labour necessary to cultivate the land.

 

Calculating the value of the juft in Khalili 38

According to Diyānat, juft was the area a yoke of oxen furrowed in 15 days (Diyānat 1988, 1:162). However, his table illustrates that the value of juft in various localities fluctuates drastically between 1,660 m2 and 180,000 m2 (Diyānat 1988, 1:162-63). Lambton did not attribute a certain value to juft but rendered it as plough-land, seemingly understanding the term not exactly as a unit of measure but as a way for dividing lands amongst the community. In other words, juft did not represent a specific value; it referred to a share of a whole (see Lambton 1953, 347-348, 379).

To help resolve this conundrum, I consulted two more sources: one from twelfth-century Iran and one from fourteenth-century Egypt. The first is the Yawāqīt al-ʿulūm—a concise encyclopaedia written in Persian in the 6th/12th century— by an anonymous author (now identified as Abū Muḥammad Ṭāhir b. Aḥmad Qazwīnī) who gives two possible conversions for juft, which he calls juftī. One is for Qazvīn, where a juft amounts to the surface area of a square whose sides are one gaz (Anonymous, 246). If this were correct, the area of a juft would be close to 1 m2, which cannot be right. The anonymous author gives the second meaning of juft as a surface area of a square with 15 qaṣaba sides. If we take Hinz’s conversion of a qaṣaba as about 4 metres, this gives us a square of 60 by 60 metres, meaning a juft equates to about 3,600 m2. Meanwhile, the Egyptian source, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā by al-Qalqashandī (vol. 3, 446) determined a faddān (which is the Arabic equivalent of a juft) as a square with sides that are 20 qaṣabas long, i.e. 80 metres (1 qaṣaba = 4 m). Then this gives us a square of 80 by 80 metres, which means a faddān equates to a total area of ca. 6,400 m2.

If we assume that the different hardnesses of soil are what determines the values of juft and faddān, then surely the Yawāqit’s origin in Iran would make it more applicable to medieval Afghanistan than al-Qalqashandī’s much better known Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā.

Thus, the surface area of the land mentioned in Khalili 38 is 40 by 3,600 m2, which gives us around 144,000 m2. This is big! About the size of 20 football pitches. It would take 40 days to plough this land with two oxen. By the way, the document also tells us the sales price, which was 1 Bukhāran gold dīnār and four dāngs.

 

References

Anonymous. Yawāqīt al-ʿulūm, edited by Muḥammad Taqī Dānish-pazhūh. Tehran: Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1967.

Diyānat, Abū al-Ḥasan. Farhang-i tārīkhī-yi sanjish-hā va arzish-hā. 2 vols. Tabriz: Nīmā, 1988.

Hinz, Walther. Islamische Maβe und Gewichte umgerechnet ins metrische System. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955.

Lambton, Ann K. S. Landlord and Peasant in Persia, a Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.

al-Qalqashandī, Aḥmad. Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā. 14 vol. Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Khadīwiyya, 1914-1922. 

Ṣafarī Āq Qalʿa, ʿAlī and Īrānī, Nafīsah. Kuhan-tarīn farhang-namah-yi dānish-i istīfā. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2016.