Royal Cubits to Meters (cubit to m)

1 royal cubit equals 0.525 meters exactly.

1 royal cubit = 0.525 meters

How to convert royal cubits to meters

To convert royal cubits to meters, multiply the number of royal cubits by 0.525. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 1.904761905 (rounded).

meters = royal cubits × 0.525

Example: 10 royal cubits = 5.25 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the royal cubit varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Royal Cubit (cubit)

Ancient EgyptianHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

The standard Egyptian cubit of about 52.5 cm (20.7 in), divided into 7 palms of 4 fingers. Surviving cubit rods were used to lay out the pyramids.

Among the earliest standard measures on record is the royal cubit, written meh niswt, meaning the cubit of the king. The English word cubit comes from Latin cubitum, the elbow, since the unit was first the forearm. The Egyptian version ran longer than the common cubit, holding seven palms of four fingers, or 28 fingers, against 24 for the ordinary one. It appears in Old Kingdom building work from at least the Step Pyramid of Djoser, around 2700 BC.

Our knowledge of its size comes from physical rods. Richard Lepsius compared fourteen of them in 1865, and examples from the tombs of Maya at Saqqara and Kha at Thebes survive, one folding rod being in the Museo Egizio in Turin. Measured rods fall between about 523.5 and 529.2 mm, so the 52.5 cm used here is one common estimate within that range. In modern terms the cubit is roughly 20.6 to 20.8 inches, a little over half a metre.

1 royal cubit = 0.525 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Cubit; Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian units of measurement

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

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