Drawing on Babylonian data from the Iron age, this paper is built around a series of case studies with a bearing on the overall topic of metrology, standards and equivalences. Several of these case studies concern metrology sensu stricto, while others refer to standardized procedures in certain socio-economic settings. The paper’s principal interest lies in describing change and in establishing its causes, or at least in exploring pathways for doing so. Causation will involve recourse to societal, economic, metro-mathematical and political forces, including the latters’ drawing on religion and religious institutions both for the justification and the implementation of ‘standards’. This in turn throws into sharper relief some propria of Iron Age Babylonia’s society, economy and political system.