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powers in which humans were not just spectators but were obliged to play an active part in helping to bring about the required phenomena by acting in full unison with nature. This meant performing a given set of rituals at the appropriate times.
In recent years the study of megalithic remains such as Stonehenge in terms of hypothetical astronomical alignments has led to various interesting speculations concerning prehistoric man's knowledge of the calendar. A careful assessment of these views has been made by D.C. Heggie.5 It has even been suggested that many of the markings found on upper palaeolithic artefacts and in caves are probably calendrical or astronomical in nature.
Ancient Egypt
In the oldest civilizations we find definite correlations between social and natural events. In Egypt, where everything depended on the Nile, the coronation of a new pharaoh was often postponed until a new beginning in the cycle of nature provided a propitious starting-point for his reign. It was made to coincide either with the rising of the river in early summer or with the recession of the waters in autumn when the fertilized fields were ready to be sown. The royal ritual was closely associated with the history of Osiris, the divine prototype on whom the pharaohs modelled themselves by re-enacting his traditional deeds. Osiris represented the life-giving waters and the soil fertilized by the Nile. After the Nile had receded the land eventually appeared to die, but on the reappearance of the waters it revived again. The Osiris myth embodied this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and gave the promise of immortality. At death a series of rites enabled the pharaoh himself to become Osiris and thereby safe from the depredations of time. At first this way to immortality was essentially a royal prerogative, but eventually similar rites were thought to confer immortality on anyone who could afford to imitate them. As S. G. F. Brandon has pointed out, the great popularity of the cult of Osiris meant, in effect, the adoption by the Egyptians of a definite concept of time, although this may not have been consciously recognized. For, since the Egyptians believed that Osiris had actually lived in their land long ago, his cult signified that a particular historical event, in this case the death and resurrection of Osiris, could be perpetually repeated by magical simulation so that its supposed good effects could benefit those persons on whose behalf the rites were performed.6
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Although the Osiris cult was a striking instance of what Brandon called the 'ritual perpetuation of the past', it was concerned only with personal immortality and generated no interest in the past as such. On the contrary, by trying to re-create on specific occasions particular events associated with Osiris thought was concentrated on the present rather than on the past. The Egyptians regarded time as a succession of recurring phases. They had very little sense of history or even of past and future. For, although there was an absolute past, it was normative and was not regarded as receding.7 They thought of the world as essentially static and unchanging. In the beginning the gods created the world with everything in it organized on a permanent pattern. The cosmic balance, which involved the regular recurrence of the seasonal phenomena, could, however, only be maintained by an unceasing control. On earth this was the function of the pharaoh. Historical incidents were no more than superficial disturbances of the established order or recurring events of unchanging significance. This idea of a perpetually repetitive pattern of events inspired a sense of security from the menace of change and decay. If some crisis occurred to disturb the customary order of things, it could not be something really new but was foreseen at the creation of the world. The priests would therefore examine ancient writings to find out if the event had already occurred in the past and what solution had then been applied to it.
This evaluation of the Egyptians' attitude to time is borne out by their attitude to chronology. The years were not numbered in a linear succession but according to a particular pharaoh's reign, each mounting the throne in the year 1, and also according to the levy of taxes. The treasury officials numbered the royal possessions every two years, so that the years of a given reign were designated as the Year of, say, the Third Numbering, or the Year after the Third Numbering, and so on. This absence of a continuous sense of time made an exact computation of past centuries extremely difficult, particularly because of co-regencies, parallel reigns and fictitious reigns. When they said, for example, 'in the reign of the King Cheops' they thought of a distant event situated in time in a rather vague way. Furthermore, the idea the Egyptians had of an eternal and immutable world meant that they never imagined any evolution of social conditions. There were periods of considerable social disturbance, particularly at the end of the Old Kingdom, but only the literary texts mention them. The historical texts were confined to enumerating the kings who lived in those troubled years and do not give any indication that something important was occurring at that time. For
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nearly 3,000 years the recording of historical events by the Egyptians was characterized by a preoccupation with royal lists and a lack of precise dates. Only one Egyptian historian is known to us, the priestly scribe Manetho who compiled the list of 211 the pharaohs and conveniently divided them into the particular groups or dynasties which Egyptologists still employ today. But Manetho, who lived in the third century BC, wrote in Greek and his work must be regarded as Hellenistic in character rather than Egyptian.
Nevertheless, in one respect the Egyptians made an outstanding contribution to the science of time. For they devised what Otto Neugebauer has described as 'the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history'.8 Their civil year consisted of twelve months, each of thirty days, with five additional days at the end of each year, making 365 in all. In Neugebauer's view, it originated on purely practical grounds by continual observation and averaging of the time intervals between successive arrivals of the Nile flood at Heliopolis, the rising of the Nile being the main event in Egyptian life. At first the Egyptians did not realize that the astronomical year does not consist of exactly 365 days but contains an extra fraction (about one-quarter) of a day. The discrepancy was soon recognized and another calendar was then introduced which kept more closely in phase with astronomical phenomena. It was noted that the rising of the Nile occurred when the last star to appear on the horizon, before dawn obscures all stars, was the dog star Sothis, or Sirius as it is known to us. This 'heliacal rising, to use the term employed in Greek astronomy, thus came to be regarded as the natural fixed point of the 'Sothic' calendar. Astronomical computations show that the first day of the two calendars agreed in the year 2773 BC, and it has been concluded that this was when the Sothic calendar was introduced.9 There is reason to associate this with the Minister of King Zoser of the Third Dynasty known as Imhotep, later deified as the Father of Egyptian science. The Sothic calendar kept pace with the seasons, but the civil calendar did not. The two coincided at intervals of 1460 (= 365 × 4) years. The civil year was divided into three conventional seasons" --called time of inundation, sowing time, and harvest time--and each of them was divided into four months, these being of course conventional too and not connected with the moon. Despite the linguistic anomaly that the season called 'the time of inundation' would in due course fall in one of the other seasons, the Egyptians retained the 365-day calendar right down to the Roman period because of its convenience as an automatic record of the passage of time in an era, each
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year containing the same number of days, unlike our years. This calendar was just what was needed for astronomical calculations. It was taken up by the Hellenistic astronomers, became the standard astronomical system of reference in the Middle Ages, and was even used by Copernicus in his lunar and planetary tables. The Egyptians also had a lunar calendar to regulate festivals by phases of the moon. They found that 309 lunar months were almost equal to twenty-five civil years.
In a nearly cloudless country such as Egypt observation of the sun was a useful way of telling the time and it is therefore not surprising that the earliest known sola
r clock has been found there. A fragment of an Egyptian sun-clock dating from about 1500 BC is now in a museum in Berlin. Shaped like a T-square, it was placed horizontally with the crosshead laid towards the east in the forenoon, thereby casting a shadow along the stem which was graduated with marks for six hours. As the sun rose higher in the sky the shadow shortened until noon, when it disappeared at the sixth hour mark. Then the instrument was relaid with the crosshead towards the west so that the lengthening shadow gradually moved back along the hour marks to the twelfth. The earliest clocks of this type were correct only at the equinoxes, and not until much later was it possible to take due account of the seasonal changes in the position of the sun. Eventually a series of hour scales, seven in number, was devised to accommodate these changes, but even then this timepiece was seldom accurate. The warrior pharaoh Tuthmosis III referred to the hour indicated by the sun's shadow at a critical juncture of one of his campaigns in Asia, and it would therefore seem that he carried with him a portable sun-clock.10 Another form of sun-clock employing the direction rather than the length of the sun's shadow was the sundial, but the Egyptians who invented it were far from understanding the subtleties involved in making an accurate instrument of this type, which must be calibrated for the latitudes of the different places where it is to be used.
To provide a means of measuring time at night the Egyptians also invented the water-clock, or 'clepsydra' as the Greeks later called it. Two main types were developed, depending on whether water flowed out of or into a graduated vessel. Whereas inflow clocks were usually cylindrical, outflow clocks were in the form of inverted cones with a small hole at or near the bottom, the time being indicated by the level of water. Clepsydrae were also used by the Greeks and Romans. Vitruvius, writing about 30 BC, described a number of types. To make them indicate seasonal hours, either the rate of flow or the scale of hours had to
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be varied according to the time of year, and considerable ingenuity appears to have been applied to achieve this.
The Egyptians also used a plumb-line, which they called the 'Merkhet', to determine the time at night. They observed the transits of selected stars across the meridian as they came into line with two Merkhets. A Merkhet is on permanent exhibition in the Science Museum, London. It is thought to date from about 600 BC. According to the inscription that it bears, it belonged to the Son of 2 priest of the Temple of Horus at Edfu, in Upper Egypt.
As mentioned in chapter 2, we are indebted to the Egyptians for our present division of the day into twenty-four hours, although the Egyptian hours were not of equal length, since at all times of the year the periods of daylight and darkness were each divided into twelve hours. The end of the night was marked by the heliacal rising of a particular star. However, because the sun not only participates in the daily rotation of the heavens from east to west but also has its own slow annual motion relative to the stars in the opposite direction, different heliacal risings occur throughout the year. Instead of choosing a different star daily, the Egyptian priests, who were primarily concerned with the timing of the nightly service in their temples, made a fresh choice every ten days, a period of time (and stellar constellation) known as a 'decan'. The oldest astronomical texts now known are found on the lids of wooden coffins dating from the Ninth Dynasty (c. 2150 BC). They are called 'diagonal star-clocks', or 'diagonal calendars', and they give the names of the stars associated with the respective decans. These star charts were provided to enable the deceased to tell the time of night or the date in the calendar.11 Incidentally, the twelve signs of the zodiac did not appear in Egypt until the Hellenistic period, nor is there any trace of astrological ideas there before then.
Since the Egyptian civil year contained 365 days, there were thirty-six decans in the year (plus the five extra days at the end of the year), and the sky was divided accordingly. During the summer, when Sirius rises heliacally, only twelve of these divisions of the sky can be seen rising during the hours of darkness, and it was this that led to the twelve-hour division of the night. As for the period of daylight, a simple sundial on an obelisk of Seti I, about 1300 BC, indicates ten hours between sunrise and sunset, to which two more were added for morning and evening twilight. As previously mentioned, these divisions of the day and night led to the twenty-four 'seasonal' hours of the complete day in Hellenistic and Roman times. In antiquity only the Hellenistic astronomers used
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hours of equal length, these being the same as the seasonal hours at the date of the spring equinox. Since, following Babylonian practice, all astronomical computations involving fractions were conducted in the sexagesimal system, instead of our current decimal system, these 'equinoctial' hours were divided by the astronomers into sixty firsts, or minutes, and each of these was subdivided into sixty seconds. Thus, as Neugebauer has succinctly remarked, our present way of dividing up the day into hours, minutes, and seconds 'is the result of a Hellenistic modification of an Egyptian practice combined with Babylonian numerical procedures'.12
Sumeria and Babylonia
Although there was always the possibility of drought or flooding, the Nile seldom brought disaster to Egypt. Mesopotamian civilization developed in a very different environment. The Tigris and Euphrates are far less uniform in their behaviour than the Nile. The inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia had to contend with variations of climate, scorching winds, torrential rains, and devastating floods over which they had little control. The mood of Mesopotamian civilization reflected this element of force and violence in nature which gave no grounds for believing that the ravages of time could be surmounted by a ritual cult like that of Osiris in Egypt. Although there was evidence of cosmic order in the motions of sun, moon, and stars and in the cycle of the seasons, this order was not regarded as securely established but had continually to be achieved by the integration of conflicting divine wills or powers.13 The basic framework of society in Mesopotamia remained the same for 2,000 years or more, but at different times Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians were dominant and the order of society was far less static than in Egypt. Whereas in Egypt the pharaoh symbolized the triumph of an invincible divine order over the forces of chaos, in Mesopotamia kingship represented the struggle of a human order with all its anxieties and hazards to integrate itself with the universe.14
The sense of insecurity which affected the city-states of Mesopotamia led to a rudimentary interest in the history of social order. This is revealed in texts going back to about 2000 BC, notably in the 'Sumerian King List' which begins with a sequence of eight kings, presumably fabulous, whose reigns add up to a total of 241,200 years!15 The sequence was then interrupted by a flood that was so devastating that a new start had to be made and again kingship had to be 'lowered from heaven'.
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Archaeological evidence has revealed that a cataclysmic flood overwhelmed the Sumerian plains about 4200 BC.
Despite their interest in this past event and the compilation of chronological lists of kings with grandiloquent accounts of their achievements, the Sumerians and their successors were not really historically minded. They were mainly interested in themselves and were content to leave historical matters relatively indefinite.16 Their reason for perpetuating the memory of the Flood was most probably magical. A destructive flood was an annual possibility, and the god of Heaven Anu and the storm-god Enlil, who were believed to have been responsible for the decision to destroy mankind, were invoked in the incantation passages of the legend of the Flood. Similarly, although libraries were established in temples and palaces in order to conserve records of the past, there is no evidence of any interest in history, except in so far as it was a guide to action in the present. Indeed, the general conception of the cosmic process envisaged by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia precluded the possibility of history having any ultimate significance or purpose. The apparent lack of any meaning in its repetitive pattern is expressed in the following passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh: 'There is no permanence. Do w
e build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? . . . From the days of old there is no permanence.'17
Although in Mesopotamia kingship was never so important as in Egypt, its function was the maintenance of harmony between earth and heaven. There were at one time a number of city-states, each with its own god. Unified rule was ultimately achieved by Hammurabi towards the beginning of the second millenium BC, with its centre in Babylon. In cosmic terms this implied the ascendancy of Marduk, the god of Babylon, over the other gods. As a result, the most important ritual in Mesopotamia was the spring New Year Festival at which the epic of the creation of the world by Marduk was recited. The significance of this epic was not as a record of the past, but rather as a means of ensuring the theologico- political supremacy of Marduk in the present. For Marduk was not the most ancient of the gods, and his lordship over the other gods was meant to justify the political supremacy that Babylon had acquired.
Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day Page 4