Experimental Archaeology:Investigating the Evolution of Hydrostatic Balances throughout History (An Experimental Approach)

Abstract

More than two thousand years ago the first hydrostatic balance with a rudimentary structure was invented by the Greek sage “Archimedes.” Iranian scholars would later develop balances that were used not only for weighing but also for determining the density and titration of alloys.To appraise the path of evolution of these balances as well as their potentials, an experimental research program was undertaken by the Iranian Research Organisation for Science and Technology (IROST). Therefore, five different balances were selected, ranging from the oldest known in the history of science, the Archimedes balance, to the most sophisticated one, the balance of wisdom by Al-Khazini, which are separated by a lapse of time of about fourteen hundred years. Balances designed by Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni, Zakariya Al-Razi, and Omar Khayyam were the other three. In the course of the research, replicas of the selected balances were designed and fabricated according to the remaining design details in the related literature. The article covers the detailed design of each balance, their construction and functional test details as well as a comparison of their functions and their precision in densitometry and titration.

Keywords

• hydrostatic balances
• archimedes
• al-khazini
• balance of wisdom
• mizan al-hikma
• razzi
• al-biruni
• khayyam