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March 22nd, 2007Ancient Calendars
In Europe we have discovered archaeological finds which indicate that over 20,000 years ago scratched lines on sticks and bones, or carefully gouged holes were used as ancient calendars, believed by academics to demonstrate ways of indicating the days between phases of the moon, ‘lunar cycles’. Around five thousand years ago, the ancient Sumerians, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (now in Iraq), had a highly developed system :
- each year was divided into months;
- each month consisted of thirty days;
- each day was divided into twelve periods (each period has been calculated to be roughly equivalent to two hours by today’s time measurement);
- each two hour period consisted of thirty parts (calculated to be roughly equivalent to four minutes by today’s measurement).
No written records exist relating to the ancient sacred site of Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England (UK), but it has been suggested that the alignments indicate it was used to measure ’seasonal’ or ‘celestial changes’. It is believed that these measurements were used to inform the time setting of rituals and events, and possibly further used to indicate when crop planting, harvests or festivals could start.
The earliest Egyptian calendar known is believed to be based upon lunar cycles The ancient Egyptians later recognised, and it is thought discovered, the ‘Dog Star’ in ‘Canis Major’, which we now call ‘Sirius’. The Dog Star rose alongside the Sun every 365 days. It is believed from this the 365-day calendar was devised, with approximate dating of this development to 4236 BC. This is a significant date, as historians claim that this is probably the earliest recorded year in the history of time.
Approximately 2000 BC the ancient Babylonians formulated a system based on lunar cycles of;
- a year, calculated to be of 354-days duration;
- a year structured on 12 lunar months;
- the length of the month alternated, consisting of either a 29-day or 30-day period.
The Mayans, of Central America, however used a combination of influences to calculate their calendar. The year was devised according to journey of the Sun, the Lunar cycle and the planet Venus. This calculation produced two calendars; the first was of 260-days duration, and the second of 365-days. It is believed that this calendar influenced the development of the Mayan culture from around 2000 BC - 1500 AD. Examination of ancient records give 3113 BC as the date for Creation of the Earth. With scientific progress we now know that this is highly unlikely but perhaps Creation should be interpreted according to Mayan beliefs on the planet and the universe. The Mayan system was later used in sections of the great Aztec calendar stones.
The Mohammedan Calendar is known to have been in operation since the day of the Hegira’, 16 July, 662 AD. This calendar is made up of twelve lunar months, with each month calculated to twenty-nine days + twelve hours + forty-four minutes.
Other civilisations, like those in the Western hemisphere such as our own, adopted a 365-day solar calendar allowing a leap year every fourth year. The ‘Julian Calendar’ was introduced in 46 BC, fixing the year to 365 days, and as highlighted, including an extra day every fourth year. This was later modified for the ‘Gregorian Year’, also known as the ‘New Style’ which was introduced in 1582 (taken on in the British Isles as late as 1752). Pope Gregory XIII was responsible for its introduction and formulation, which gave rise to the standardisation of many Christian feast days.
The first of each month was known as the ‘Calends’ by the Romans, which is perhaps why the name given to describe the full cycle of the year is known as the ‘calendar’. This Roman term ‘calends’ is known to have meant ‘the coming together’, ‘the meeting’ of people, which always occurred on the first day of the month. The ‘Pontifex’, the head of the college of sacred priests, would then inform the people of which dates within the month were to be sacred, days given to festivals or the new moon.
‘Time is, time was, time’s past.’
Byron, Don Juan.
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Clocks
‘For the next inn he spurs a main,
In hasts alights and scuds away -
But time and tide for no man stay.’
Somerville, The Sweet-scented Miser.
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Sun Clocks
‘Obelisks’ (tall four-sided tapered monuments) were carefully constructed and even purposefully geographically located we believe around 3500 BC. A shadow was cast as the Sun moved across the sky by the obelisk, which it appears was then marked out in sections, allowing people to clearly see the two halves of the day. Some of the sections have also been found to indicate the ‘year’s longest and shortest days’, which it is thought were developments added later to allow identification of other important time subdivisions.
Another ancient Egyptian ’shadow clock‘ or ’sundial’ has been discovered to have been in use around 1500 BC, which allowed the measuring of the passage of ‘hours’. The sections were divided into ten parts, with two ‘twilight hours’ indicated, occurring in the morning and the evening. For it to work successfully then at midday or noon, the device had to be turned 180 degrees to measure the afternoon hours.
The Egyptians also used the ‘Merkhet’, the oldest known astronomical tool, which is believed to have been developed around 600 BC. Two merkhets were used to establish a north-south line which was achieved by lining them up with the ‘Pole Star’. This enabled the measurement of night-time hours, when certain stars crossed the marked meridian. By 30 BC, ‘Vitruvius’ describes thirteen different sundial styles being used across Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy, inherently demonstrating how the development must have grown to be more complex.
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Water Clocks
In the Far East, mechanised ‘astronomical’ and ‘astrological’ clock-making is known to have developed between 200-1300 AD. In 1088 AD, ‘Su Sung’ and his colleagues designed and constructed a highly complex mechanism that incorporated a water-driven escapement, invented about 725 AD. It was over seven metres in height and had all manor of mechanisms running simultaneously. During each hour an observer could view the movement of a power-driven armillary sphere, constructed of bronze rings, an automatically rotating celestial globe, together with five doors that allowed an enticing glimpse of seeing individual statues, all of which rang bells, banged gongs or held inscribed tablets showing the hour or a special time of the day. The appearance and actions would have appeared similar to the automaton we know so well today.
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Europe
These dials were placed above doorways and indicated the midday and four ‘tides’ or times of the sunlit day. In the tenth-century, one English (UK) model showed the marking of the tides compensated for including seasonal changes caused by the Sun’s altitude.
In Italy, during the early-to-mid fourteenth-century, large mechanical clocks housed in towers began to appear in several of the large cities. These clocks appear to have been plagued by the same problem as that of the ‘water clock’, that of regulating the mechanisms and maintaining the accurate time. This appears to have been due to the oscillation period of the escapement depending on a driving force which had sufficient friction in the drive mechanism.
A technological advance came with the invention of the ‘Spring-powered’ clock, around 1500-1510, credited to ‘Peter Henlein’ of Nuremberg (Germany). These were instantly popular although the spring-powered clock did have one problem, that of slowing down when the mainspring unwound. In the sixteenth-century, and even through until the nineteenth-century, these clocks were mainly the reserve of the wealthy, when the reduced size meant it could now be put on a mantle shelf or table. The development of the spring-powered clock was the precursor to accurate time keeping.
The Mystic, Mystical-WWW.
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Mechanical Clocks
Huygens, in 1657, developed what is known today as the ‘balance wheel and spring assembly’, which is still found in some of today’s wrist watches. This allowed watches of the seventeenth-century to keep accuracy of time to approximately ten minutes a day. Meanwhile, in London, England (UK) in 1671, ‘William Clement’ began building clocks with an ‘anchor’ or ‘recoil’ escapement, which interfered even less with the perpetual motion of the pendulum system of clock.
‘George Graham’, in 1721, invented a design with the degree of accuracy to ‘one second a day’ by compensating for changes in the pendulum’s length caused by temperature variations. The mechanical clock continued to develop until they achieved an accuracy of ‘a hundredth-of-a-second a day’, when the pendulum clock became the accepted standard in most astronomical observatories.
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Quartz Clocks
Quartz|clocks continue to dominate the market because of the accuracy and reliability of the performance, also being inexpensive to produce on mass scale. The time keeping performance of the quartz clock has now been surpassed by the ‘Atomic clock’.
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Atomic Clocks
The development of radar and the subsequent experimentation with high frequency radio communications during the 1930s and 1940s created a vast amount of knowledge regarding ‘electromagnetic waves’, also known as ‘microwaves’, which interact with the atoms. The development of atomic clocks focused firstly on microwave resonances in the chemical Ammonia and its molecules. In 1957, ‘NIST’, the ‘National Institute of Standards and Technology’, completed a series of tests using a ‘Cesium Atomic Beam’ device, followed by a second programme of experiments by NIST in order to have something for comparision when working at the atomic level. By 1960, as the outcome of the programmes, ‘Cesium Time Standards’ were incorporated as the official time keeping system at NIST.
The ‘Natural frequency’ recognized currently is the measurement of time, used by all scientists, defines the period of ‘one second’ as exactly ‘9,192,631,770 Oscillations’ or ‘9,192,631,770 Cycles of the Cesium Atom’s Resonant Frequency’. From the ‘Macrocosm’, or ‘Planetary Alignment’, to the ‘Microcosm’, or ‘Atomic Frequency’, the cesium now maintains an accuracy with a degree of error to about ‘one-millionth of a second per year’.
Much of modern life has come to depend on such precise measurements of time. The day is long past when we could get by with a timepiece accurate to the nearest quarter hour. Transportation, financial markets, communication, manufacturing, electric power and many other technologies have become dependent on super-accurate clocks. Scientific research and the demands of modern technology continue to drive our search for ever more accuracy. The next generation of Cesium Time Standards is presently under development at NIST’s ‘Boulder Laboratory’ and other laboratories around the world.
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Time Out
From the Mystic’s point of view, time is and will now continue to be, dictated by computerised equipment which relies on the oscillation of frequencies in silicon chip technology. Computers, we have found, already challenge our lack of forethought in their design development, with continual revisions, and, as we find industry and commerce worrying about the advent of 31 December 1999, what changes will be made, implemented to the technology. What will the computers globally decide is the date as we move into a new century, as the computer only reads the last two digits in their internal time chips. Will it be 1 January 1900 or will it be 1 January 2000? Experts are still working on that one! What will happen to the economy, to security (as the banks may find their time coded computerised locks of little use), to our understanding of technology as we work towards that moment, and as the moment itself, should the systems fail to produce all the things we initially dreamt of ?
Our concept of TIME and using it together with TECHNOLOGY still has room for radical re-assessment in terms of man’s evolutionary thinking regarding our view of the past, our onward journey into the future and our concept of time in relationship to universe. With all this technology a very old ‘Earth’ proverb comes to mind:-
‘Time and tide wait for no man.’
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March 22nd, 2007 at 1:03 pm
[…] Original post by Decorative Clocks Filed under Invention by Permalink • Print • Email • Comment […]
October 10th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
I found a little history piece on clocks here:
http://www.clocksbybellacor.com/type.htm
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