Le nbi Et Le Canon De Proportions

A re-examination of the corpus of length-measuring instruments reveals the existence of standardized tools and apparently unstandardized ones. It is shown that the latter are inscribed with different scales of the canon of proportion which were intended to draw the preparatory grids for decorated walls. Some of them, found at Kahun, have previously been wrongly interpreted as foreign standards. The word nbi is studied anew and the author demonstrates, with the help of the plan of Senenmut's tomb (TT 71) sketched on an ostracon, that the nbi is a linear measure of 70 cm (divided into seven units of 10 cm), i.e. a wooden rod inscribed with the canon at full scale. In use possibly as early as the Old Kingdom, the nbi was certainly employed from the Twelfth Dynasty onward in several parts of Egypt, until the reform of the canon during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty made this implement obsolete.