Parasang

The parasang, also known as a farsakh (from Arabic), is a historical Iranian unit of walking distance, the length of which varied according to terrain and speed of travel.

[3] In addition to its appearance in various forms in later Iranian languages (e.g. Middle Persian frasang or Sogdian fasukh), the term also appears in Greek as parasangēs (παρασάγγης), in Latin as parasanga, in Hebrew as parasa (פרסה), in Armenian as hrasakh (հրասախ), in Georgian as parsakhi, in Syriac as parsḥā (ܦܪܣܚܐ), in Turkish as fersah, and in Arabic as farsakh (فرسخ).

[8] In his 1st-century Parthian stations, Isidore of Charax "evidently [used for schoenus] the same measure as the Arabic parasang (while in Persia proper 4 sch[onii] equal 3 par[asang]).

[1] But in 1920, Kenneth Mason of the Royal Geographical Society deduced that the parasang used in Xenophon's Babylonian travel accounts was equal to only 2.4 miles (3.9 km).

"[1] A 1985 suggestion proposes that the parasang and Attic stade were defined in terms of the Babylonian beru, an astromically-derived sexagesimal unit of time and linear distance.

parsoth), the parasang also finds use in the Babylonian Talmud, in several uses, for instance in a description of the biblical ladder to heaven, the width of which is given as 8,000 parsaoth (Chullin 91b).