The second of three volumes of John Neal’s collected works. Ancient metrology - once the playground of Newton, but now largely ignored even by archaeologists - ought to cease to be a pariah subject and regain its place at the centre of the study of antiquity. In the past, the widely attested variations in ancient linear measurements have been put down to sloppiness on the part of our ancestors. But Neal is able to show that such variations belong to a logical, elegant and cohesive system partially based on divisions of the Earth’s surface at different points on the longitudinal meridian. Professor Michael Vickers, University of Oxford, review of Neal’s work in Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. 2001.