What exactly is time, and how did we find ourselves arriving at our current system of 12 months in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. After all, you would think wouldn't you that it would make far more sense to use a straightforward decimal system, multiples of 10 are used in pretty much every other form of measurement system known to modern man.
Well it transpires that our modern timekeeping system is actually an amalgam of systems devised by various cultures. The ancient Greeks, for whom we have an awful lot to be thankful for, were the first culture to divide a year into 12 months. They also then divided each of these months into thirty days.
This is all well and good, however, it transpires that we have the Egyptians and the Babylonians to thank for coming up with what we now know to be the 24 hour clock. They divided the day into 24 parts that they referred to as hours. However, their system was far from perfect as they were seemingly quite lazy and just divided the time between the sun rising and setting into 12 equal parts.
Now obviously the time between the sun rising and setting is not a constant, the seasons see to that, and the length of both day and night varies depending on where in the world you are. So, not the most accurate of systems but at least we are starting to see some progress.
Eventually some clever individuals came up with the idea of simply dividing the whole day into 24 equal parts and calling them hours. Now it became possible to tell the time in a much more accurate fashion. The final part of the equation comes when the Sumerians come up with the idea of dividing each hour into 60 minutes consisting of 60 seconds each. This is known as the Sumerian Sexagecimal System, which is based on the number 60 and was developed some 4000 or so years ago. The number 60 had huge significance to various cultures of the time. It is at this point that we arrived at what we now know as time.
Our ancient ancestors, for the most part only really needed a rough idea of what time of day it was, let's be honest there were very few really urgent appointments for a peasant farmer or common labourer to keep, as long as he got up in the morning and worked till it was dark then he knew everything would be ok and the world would keep turning. However, the human race is a naturally inquisitive beast and is constantly looking for ways to develop and so came up with more ingenious ways of recording the time more accurately.
The first of these was the Sundial. Now of course we have come a long way from these rudimentary time keeping systems. Early sundials were replaced by water clocks and the Saxons even used a candle clock where a candle was divided into equal segments that each took an hour to burn. In the early years of the second millenium more sophisticated timepieces came into being. Invariably they were huge mechanical clocks and were reserved for the local church, but the evolution of antique clocks had been set in motion.
In the 21st century time keeping has become a precise science and modern watches keep time to within a quarter of a second per year. However, I ask the question: Do they really have the intrinsic beauty and craftsmanship of the early antique clocks of our forefathers? I would imagine that it is a matter of taste. An antique clock is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and in my opinion no home is complete without one.
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