Convert Feddan to hectares

A unit fixed by statute, not custom

Unlike most units in this atlas, the feddan has a single legal value. Egyptian land law defines it against the metre, so conversions to hectares and acres are exact arithmetic rather than approximations from scholarship. That makes it unusually safe to work with: a feddan figure from a modern Egyptian title deed needs no regional qualification.

The value derives from the older definition of 333⅓ square qasabah, the qasabah being 3.55 metres. Retaining that exact chain during metrication is why the metric value is an awkward-looking 4,200.833 rather than a round number.

Qirat, sahm, and inheritance

One feddan is 24 qirat, and one qirat is 24 sahm — so a feddan contains 576 sahm. This structure exists because Islamic inheritance shares are fractional, and a base divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12 lets most partitions resolve into whole sub-units without remainder. A holding described as "2 feddan, 8 qirat, 12 sahm" is a precise area, not an approximation.

When digitising such records, convert the whole triple at once rather than each component separately. Converting qirat to square metres, rounding, and then summing is the standard way a partition record stops adding up to the parent holding.

Agricultural economics in feddan

Egyptian crop statistics, subsidy allocations, irrigation quotas and yield figures are all published per feddan. Comparing them against international data — which is almost always per hectare — requires the conversion, and the direction matters: a yield per feddan is smaller than the same yield per hectare by a factor of about 2.38.

Because the feddan sits between the acre and the half-hectare, eyeballed comparisons are unreliable. Cotton, rice and sugarcane yield tables in particular are frequently misquoted internationally by treating a feddan figure as if it were per acre, an error of about 3.5 per cent in one direction or per hectare, an error of well over half.

Regional relatives

Sudan uses the same feddan. Historic Ottoman-era records across the Levant use the dönüm or dunam instead, and these are much smaller — the metric dunam is 1,000 m². Confusing a feddan with a dunam understates an area by more than a factor of four, and both units appear in overlapping archives from the same period.

For land in Egypt itself, the qirat also exists as a mass unit for precious metals with a completely unrelated value. Context — a land record versus an assay certificate — is the only disambiguator, so always carry the dimension explicitly when transcribing.

Older Egyptian records may also express area in the marabaa or in square qasabah, the pre-metric building blocks of the feddan. These convert exactly, because the qasabah itself was fixed at 3.55 metres, but they are easy to mistake for modern square-metre figures when a document has been partially transliterated. If an area figure produces an implausible holding size, checking whether the source unit is the square qasabah rather than the square metre resolves most such cases immediately.

Common mistakes to avoid

• A feddan is not an acre: it is about 3.5 per cent larger.
• Convert feddan-qirat-sahm triples as a whole; component-wise rounding breaks partition totals.
• The qirat is both an area unit (1/24 feddan) and a mass unit for gemstones — carry the dimension explicitly.
• Ottoman-era Levantine records use dunam, not feddan; the two differ by more than fourfold.