Although the New Year Festival symbolized the inauguration of a new solar cycle, the renewal of fertility, and victory over chaos, its celebration provided no guarantee that the social order would continue undisturbed. The king and his counsellors therefore watched for
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portents that could be interpreted, so that disasters might be foreseen and, if possible, averted. There was assumed to be a counterpart in human events to every celestial phenomenon. This belief led the priests to make careful and systematic observations of the heavenly bodies. Celestial omens began to be used as portents on a considerable scale in the first Babylonian dynasty ( eighteenth to fifteenth centuries BC), although lunar eclipses may have been regarded as ominous previously.18 The prediction of this so-called 'judicial' astrology referred to the royal court and the state and not to ordinary individuals. Horoscopic astrology, according to which the positions of the planets at the time of birth determines the fate of the individual, did not develop until much later. The oldest known horoscope goes back to 410 BC when Babylonia was part of the Persian empire.19 In Hellenistic and Roman times the Chaldeans, as the Babylonians were called, came to be regarded as the great experts in astrology. Both the older judicial astrology and the later horoscopic astrology were based on a fundamentally deterministic, or fatalistic, view of existence. People who believe that history and the destinies of men are controlled by the stars are not likely to entertain the idea of historical progress. Instead, they are more inclined to adopt a cyclical view of time, in accordance with the periodicity of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. To what degree, however, such a view of time was developed in Mesopotamian thought is not revealed by the cuneiform records, although according to Seneca the late Babylonian astronomer-priest Berossus (c. 300 BC) believed in the periodic destruction and re-creation of the universe.20
The heavens were studied not only for omens but also for the sake of the calendar. The basis of the Babylonian calendar seems always to have been lunar. The month began when the new lunar crescent was for the first time visible again after sunset. Consequently, the Babylonian day began in the evening. A lunar month defined in this way must contain a whole number of days, but sometimes this was twenty-nine and sometimes thirty. To solve this problem the motion of the sun had to be investigated. The late Babylonian astronomers of the fourth and later centuries BC studied the motions of the sun and planets with great care and mathematical ingenuity, but their most detailed investigations were of the moon because the calendar was moon-based. They invented harmonic analysis, in the sense that they introduced the idea of breaking down a complicated periodical effect into a sum of simpler periodical effects in order to make the mathematics tractable. They did not use trigonometrical methods but linear 'zigzag functions'.21
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The lunar 'year' normally comprised twelve months, but this is less than the solar year. In order to prevent the seasons getting out of phase, a thirteenth month was inserted from time to time, but there was no regular system for the intercalation of this additional month until the fifth century BC, when seven of these months began to be inserted at fixed intervals in a cycle of nineteen years. Previously it is probable that the state of the harvest decided the need for the additional month. The nineteen-year cycle depends on the discovery that nineteen solar years are very nearly equal to 235 lunar months. It is usually known as the Metonic cycle, after the Athenian astronomer Meton who introduced it in 432 BC (see Appendix 2). Whether the cycle was discovered first by the Babylonian astronomer-priests or independently by them and Meton is uncertain.22 The use of such a cycle by the late Babylonians shows that a fairly precise astronomical definition of a year was adopted by them. This was probably based on careful observation of the summer solstice. The invention of the zodiac, the belt round the sky in which the sun, moon, and planets lie, also occurred about this time.23 The twelve zodiacal signs, of equal lengths of thirty parts each, are known to have been in use from soon after 500 BC. This division of the sky was eventually carried over to the division of the circle and so led to our present habit of dividing the complete (two-dimensional) angle around a point into 360 degrees.
The nineteen-year luni-solar cycle became the foundation of the Jewish and Christian calendars, since it solved the problem of establishing the dates of new moons for religious purposes. In particular, the origin of the problem of the dating of Easter can be traced back to the Babylonians. The rituals performed by the king-priest, particularly at the New Year Festival, were regarded as the repetitions of divine actions and were meant to correspond exactly in time as well as in character with the rituals on high. From this primitive idea sprang the belief that it was important to celebrate Easter at the correct date, since this was the crucial time of combat between God (or Christ) and the Devil, and God required the support of his worshippers to defeat the Devil.
The Babylonians paid particular attention to the seven-day periods associated with successive phases of the moon, each of these periods ending with an 'evil day' on which specific taboos were enforced so that the gods could be propitiated and conciliated. These prohibitive regulations were similar to those that many other peoples in different parts of the world have observed at changes in the appearance of the moon, but the Babylonians influenced the Jews, who in their turn
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influenced the early Christians and eventually ourselves. The ultimate origin of our seven-day week and the restrictions for long imposed on Sunday activities can thus be traced back to the Babylonians.
Ancient Iran
From 539 to 331 BC Babylonia was a part of the Persian empire. It was during this period that horoscopic astrology was invented, probably in the fifth century BC. For the casting of horoscopes one needs to know the positions of the planets for a given date. Often a horoscope is required for a date for which no observations are available, and horoscopic astrology therefore needs methods for computing the positions of the planets. The oldest known system of Babylonian planetary theory is thought to have been invented not earlier than 500 BC. It is possible that the motive was astrological and that the invention of horoscopic astrology at about this time was due to the influence of Iranian doctrines of the immortality and celestial origin of the soul.
The Iranians who conquered Babylonia were a branch of the Aryan race. Their native land consisted of a central plain surrounded by mountains. This plain was largely desert and was subject to extremes of climate. It was in this harsh and inhospitable land that one of the great religions of mankind originated. This religion, known as Zoroastrianism, involved a teleological interpretation of time. The date of its founder, Zarathustra (Zoroaster is the Greek form of his name), is uncertain but it is thought that he flourished in the first half of the sixth century BC. The Iranians already had a considerable religious heritage and it is difficult to decide how much of Zoroastrianism is due to the reforms introduced by Zarathustra.
Zarathustra belonged to a pastoral tribe in northern Persia. As a young man he had a prophetic revelation that led him to preach a new faith in place of the prevailing polytheism. He denounced the old religion as the Lie and called on men to worship the deity whom he called Ahura Mazdah, the wise Lord, who stood for the Truth. Zarathustra's monotheistic religion can be regarded as a response to the social conditions of his time, an age of transition when a settled agricultural and pastoral community was being threatened by predatory tribes who still followed the nomadic way of life. Zarathustra interpreted the struggle between good and evil forces in ethical terms, and he believed that it pervaded the whole universe. Although evil could not be attributed to Ahura Mazdah, its existence had to be accounted for, and Zarathustra explained it in terms of free will. At the beginning of time two spirits were created
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by Ahura Mazdah, the good spirit Spenista Mainyu (later called Ohrmazd) and the evil and destructive spirit Angra Mainyu (later called Ahriman). The latter, although his existence was due to God, became evil by his own free choice.
Zarathustra believed that man was involved in this cosmic struggle of good and evil and that he was compelled to choose one side or the other through his own conduct. This meant that man has an inescapable moral responsibility for his own actions. Zarathustra declared that at death God passes judgement on man and that this decides his fate when the world is finally transformed into the same state of perfection as when it left the hands of the Creator. At the last, immortal glory will be the reward of those who adhere to the Truth, whereas the followers of the Lie will be condemned to 'a long age of darkness, foul food and cries of woe'.24 This doctrine of 'last things' was the first systematized eschatology in the history of religion and it profoundly influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
After Zarathustra's death his religion was taken up by the old priestly class known as the Magi and eventually became the faith of the Achaemenid dynasty. The first Persian king who seems to have accepted its basic doctrines was Darius (522-485 BC), but Achaemenid Zoroastrianism departed in certain respects from the original teachings of Zarathustra. There was some reversion to polytheism and the religion became more magical and ritualistic than ethical. Following the overthrow of the Achaemenid dynasty by Alexander of Macedon in 331 BC there was a confused period in the history of Zoroastrianism until its revival as the state religion under the Sassanian dynasty ( AD 226-651). Most of the extant documents relate to this last period, which ended with the conquest of Persia by the forces of Islam.
Long before this happened there was a tendency to identify Ahura Mazdah with the good spirit Ohrmazd. This development gave rise to a perplexing problem. For Zarathustra had spoken of the good and evil spirits as twins and thereby implied that they had a common origin. A solution of this problem led to an important heresy associated with the idea of time, personified by the ancient god Zurvan. The significance of time was, of course, implicit in the eschatological character of Zoroastrianism. In the Zurvanite heresy it became the supreme deity. The reasoning that led to this development was clearly expressed in a remarkable passage in a late writing known as the Persian Rivayat:
Except Time all other things are created. Time is the creator; and Time has no limit, neither top nor bottom. It has always been and shall be for evermore. No
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sensible person will say whence Time has come. In spite of all the grandeur that surrounded it, there was no one to call it creator; for it had not brought forth creation. Then it created fire and water; and when it had brought them together, Ohrmazd came into existence, and simultaneously Time became Creator and Lord with regard to the creation it had brought forth.25
Throughout Iranian thought there was a tendency to dualism, and it is therefore not surprising that two distinct forms or aspects of time were recognized: indivisible time, that is the eternal 'now', and time that is divisible into successive parts. The former represented the creative aspect of time and was fundamental. It was called Zurvan akarana, or infinite time, and was the progenitor of the universe and of the spirits of good and evil. Associated with the universe was the other form of time called Zurvan daregho-chvadhata, that is time of the long dominion, or finite time. This was the time that brought decay and death. It dominated the world of man and was represented by the celestial firmament. Presumably under Babylonian influence, the life-span of time of the long dominion was set at 12,000 years, the number twelve corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. This cosmic 'year' was divided into four periods, each of 3,000 years, Zarathustra's life occurring at the beginning of the final period.
The whole reason for the existence of finite time appears to have been to bring about that conflict of good and evil which eventually leads to the triumph of the former. A question that puzzled some followers of Zarathustra in later times was that, if Ohrmazd was all-powerful and so destined to overthrow Ahriman, why did this not happen immediately, so that the world would have been spared all the suffering caused by the conflict between them? An attempt to answer this question, and one which in the opinion of S. G. F. Brandon shows some consciousness of the significance of the factor of time, was made by a late Zoroastrian priest renowned for his orthodoxy. He argued that Ohrmazd, because his nature was good and just, could not destroy Ahriman until the latter had, by his evil deeds, provided just cause for his destruction.26
Finite time begins and ends with the rule of Ohrmazd. At a given moment finite time came into existence out of infinite time. It goes through a cycle of changes until it finally returns to its original state and then merges into infinite time. There is no evidence for any repetition of the cycle.
In later Zoroastrianism the emphasis laid by Zarathustra on the role of individuals and the character of their life was replaced by concern for the
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general fate of mankind. The unfolding of the divine purpose was not, however, identified with the course of human history as known to the inhabitants of Iran. Indeed Zoroastrians never attempted to relate the history of their nation to the cosmic struggle of Ohrmazd and Ahriman.
A problem concerning time and the calendar that has attracted much attention in recent years is the precise date when the Iranians adopted the Egyptian 'vague', or civil, calendar of 365 days. The Achaemenid monarch Cambyses conquered Egypt in the year 525 BC (his predecessor Cyrus had conquered Babylon in 539 BC) and so the replacement of the 'Old-Avestan calendar', as the one formerly used by the Iranians is now called, presumably occurred after that. The new calendar, now known as the 'Young-Avestan calendar' appears to have been adopted in the reign of Cambyses' great successor Darius I. The most thorough and plausible investigation of the date of its introduction is that made a few years ago by the distinguished historian of ancient astronomy the late Willy Hartner of Frankfurt University.27 He came to the conclusion that the Young-Avestan calendar was introduced on 21 March 503 BC. (21 March is the 'Gregorian' date; the corresponding 'Julian' date would be 27 March.) In this calendar the year consisted of twelve months, each of thirty days except the eighth month, which comprised thirty-five days. The most important point, however, that emerged from Hartner's investigation was that by 503 BC the Babylonian astronomer-priests had discovered that the tropical year (the year of the seasons) is not of exactly the same length as the sidereal year (the 'true' astronomical year). This was an essential step towards the determination by the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus (c. 150 BC) of the precession of the equinoxes, with its eventual important implications for the reform of the calendar in AD 1582 (see ch. 8).
According to the Iranian scholar S. H. Taqizadah, a correction was made to the Young-Avestan calendar in 441 BC to link it more closely with the seasons. It took the form of an intercalation of a full month of thirty days once every 120 years.28 The Zoroastrians still reckon dates by the years of the last Zoroastrian king of Iran, Yazdgard III of the Sassanian dynasty (who was assassinated in AD 651 after the Arabs had overrun his kingdom), thus prolonging his imaginary reign through the centuries. In this way we know that the Persian New Year in AD 632, the year in which he ascended the throne, fell on 16 June.29 The era and the Zoroastrian calendar are followed to this day by the Parsees of Bombay.
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4. Time in Classical Antiquity
Classical Greece and Hellenistic civilization
About 1200 BC the late Bronze Age civilization of Mycenae, which had dominated the Aegean world since the destruction of Knossos some 300 years before, itself collapsed under the invasion of the Dorian Greeks from the north. The early Iron Age that followed lasted until about 800 BC, when the first city-states emerged. It was a dark age similar to the Dark Age of Western Europe following the final collapse of the Roman Empire. The Mycenaean past remained a folk-memory of the Greeks that was preserved orally, culminating in the epics of Homer. In them the one certain thing about man is his mortality, and this temporal restriction was the decisive factor that distinguished men from gods. Since the Greeks looked back on the Mycenaean past as a 'Golden Age' of gods and heroes, they tend
ed to regard history as a decline from this ideal state and not as an ultimate order of reality.1
Consequently, for the Greeks, unlike the Persians, time was not a god. It only became a god in Hellenistic times when it was worshipped under the name 'Aion', but that signified a sacred, eternal time which was very different from ordinary time, chronos. Different thinkers had different ideas concerning the nature and significance of the temporal mode of existence. At the dawn of Greek literature two contrasting points of view are found in Homer and Hesiod.
In the Iliad Olympian theology and morality are dominated by space- like rather than time-like concepts, the cardinal sin being hubris, that is, going beyond one's assigned province. The whole conception, in the words of Cornford, is 'static and geometrical; everything has its limited field with bounds that must not be passed'.2 Homer was not interested in the origin of things and had no cosmogony beyond the idea that water is the origin of all things. This was expressed mythologically by calling Oceanus, the river which encircles the world's disk, the origin of all things ( Iliad, xiv. 246). W. K. C. Guthrie, who has drawn attention to this, makes the interesting point that it was probably an Ionian idea, since 'it reappears in Ionian philosophy and in the eastern peoples to
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whose influence early Ionia lay particularly open'.3 It will be recalled that Thales, the first Greek philosopher, was Ionian, and he maintained that the first principle (arche) of all things is water.
Hesiod, unlike Homer, in his Works and Days gave an account of man's decline from a primeval Golden Age; his poem was based implicitly on the concept of time, although the word 'time' never actually appears in it. The main purpose of the poem was to offer advice concerning the regulation of the activities of the year, particular days being of good or evil omen, appropriate or inappropriate for different activities. In short, time was regarded by Hesiod as an aspect of the moral ordering of the universe.
Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day Page 5