Ancient Egyptian units of measure evolved over a period of several thousand years as a combination of two systems. The oldest Egyptian body measures date to the late Pre-Dynastic where the glyph for cubit measure is included in several palettes. The oldest glyphs related to agricultural measure show up on the Palette of the Scorpion king which shows the fields being divided up by irrigation ditches.
One system was decimal, written in Horus-Eye binary fractions, and used by surveyors to reestablish the metes and bounds of fields after the inundation (the Egyptian season of akhet) and to measure long distances such as roads and canals, and the other essentially septenary system was a canon of proportions developed from body measures used in inscription grids and in the measure of commodities such as rations of grain and beer.
The second system was always exact, partitioning a hekat into Horus-Eye quotients followed by Egyptian fraction quantified remainders, scaled to 1/320th units called ro. Both systems were designed to be accounted for with unit fractions, the decimal one being an infinite series and the exact one being a finite series.
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