The man as a unit of weight is thought to be of at least Chaldean origin, with Sir Henry Yule attributing Akkadian origins to the word. The Hebrewmaneh and the Ancient Greekmina are thought to be cognate. It was originally equal to one-ninth of the weight of an artaba of water, or approximately four kilograms in modern units. İnalcık believes the ancient Persianpatimāna may have come from the late Assyrian word for "mana of the king". The man or batman spread throughout Arabia and Persia: it was adopted by the Ottoman Empire, and brought to India by the Mughal Empire. The first attestation which gives a comparison to European weights was by Pegolotti in his Pratica della mercatura, written about 1340. He reported the batman as the main unit of mass in Ayasluğ, equivalent to 32 Genoese pounds.
Ottoman Empire
The batman was first recorded in English in 1599, in Babylon, where it was said to be equal to "7 pound and 5 ounces English weight". In the central Ottoman system of weights, the batman was equal to six okas, as is attested in 1811 in Aleppo, 1821 in Baghdad and in 1850 in Constantinople. At this point, the batman was equal to 16 lb 8 ozavoirdupois.
Arabia
The mann had doubtless formed a part of the Arabian system of weights before the arrival of the Ottomans. It was divided into uqiyyas, while tenmann made one frazil. A still larger unit of mass was the bahar, of ten to forty frazils. The Arabic mann was smaller than the Ottoman batman at about 2–3 lb av., except in Basra where there were two maunds in use, both much larger than either the Arabic mann or the Ottoman batman.
The batman was used in Central Asia up until at least the 18th century. In Khiva in 1740, there were said to be two batmans : the "great batman" of 18 Russian pounds and the "lesser batman" of 9¼ Russian pounds. In Uyghur, the batman was also a measure of land area, the area that could be sown with one batman of seed.
The two main commercial weights in Persia were the tabrézy man, literally the man of Tabriz, and the sháhy man, literally the Shah's man, which was twice as large. The sháhy man was particularly used in Shiraz and Isfahan. Kelly also distinguishes a man used for copra and "provisions" at Gamron of 7 lb 12 oz av.. The United Nations Statistical Office found a wide range of values for the man in Iran in 1966, from 3 kg to 53 kg. The man was divided into mithqals : larger subdivisions included the abbassi and the ratl. The term batman appears to be reserved for the tabrézy man, approximately 2.969 kg in 1966.
The mann was and still is also used as a unit of mass in Afghanistan, but varied widely between different localities. In Kandahar it was about 8 lb av., while in Peshawar it was 80 lb av..
