Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day

by G. J. Whitrow

  Hindu thought concerning the nature of time is well illustrated by the way in which causal relations were expressed in Sanskrit. To indicate the causal relation between two notions, a compound was formed in such a way as to suggest that it is natural to begin with the effect and trace it back to its cause. This attitude tends to eliminate time, since both effect

  -88-

  and cause are regarded as co-present in the mind. Any sequence of causally related phenomena is thus always regarded as complete. This retrospective way of thinking tended to be a general feature of thought in countries such as India and China. It can be contrasted with the thought processes of Western science, in which the march of phenomena is considered to have a definite and unique temporal direction from cause to effect.

  China

  The Chinese were more interested in the practical measurement of time than were the inhabitants of India. Although the clepsydra was not invented in China, it was in use at an early stage of Chinese history. It probably came there from Babylonia, where the simplest form of the outflow type had already been in use before the time of the early Shang period (c. 1500 BC). The Chinese also knew another archaic type of water-clock, a floating bowl with a hole in its base that was adjusted so that it took a specific time to sink.4 But from the Han time onwards, that is after about 200 BC, the inflow type predominated. It was soon realized that more than one reservoir was required in order to avoid the slowing down of timekeeping that occurs with the falling pressure-head in a single vessel. Various other improvements were made, including the use of mercury, which does not freeze in cold climates in winter. Elaborate water-clocks were constructed between the second and eleventh centuries AD culminating in the remarkable instrument designed, and erected in the year 1088, by Su Sung ( 1020- 1101), a Chinese mandarin.

  Although this clock has not survived, its description by its inventor has. It was rediscovered in the mid-1950s by the leading authority on Chinese science and technology, Dr Joseph Needham of Cambridge.5 The essential feature of this timekeeping device was a linkwork escapement quite different from the verge-and-foliot system invented in Europe in the late thirteenth century (ch. 7). Water poured continually from a constant-level tank into one scoop after another of a large water- wheel, but each scoop could not descend until it was fun. As it went down it tripped two levers or weighbridges which by means of linkwork connections released a gate at the top of the wheel so as to let it move on byjust one scoop. In effect, this machine dissected time by the weighing of successive equal quantities of fluid. An astronomical check on timekeeping was made by a sighting tube pointed to a selected star. Since the timekeeping was governed mainly by the flow of water rather than the escapement action, this device can be regarded as a link between the

  -89-

  Fig. 1 A medieval Chinese water-clock

  . Although not a mechanical clock in the strict sense, Su Sung's water-clock involved a very early type of escapement. Each 24 seconds the weight of water that had poured at a steady rate into an empty cup became just sufficient to press it down and cause the wheel to rotate by one more spoke, thereby placing another empty cup under the spout. The wheel had 36 spokes and so made 100 rotations in 24 hours.

  timekeeping properties of a steady flow of liquid and those of mechanically produced oscillations. This Chinese water-wheel clock was not only quite different from, but was a good deal more accurate than, the first European mechanical clocks and in this respect may not have been surpassed until after the introduction of the pendulum clock in the seventeenth century.6 Despite its technological sophistication, the use of this elaborate clock was essentially astrological, the object apparently being to ensure that the positions of the celestial bodies would be known even if the Heavens were cloudy when any of the Emperor's wives or concubines produced offspring.

  When the first European missionaries came to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries no trace remained of the heavenly clockwork of five hundred years earlier. Indeed, the mechanical clocks which they presented to the Chinese rulers were received with surprised delight. Meanwhile, a different and much more widespread tradition of timekeeping survived involving the use of fire and incense. This tradition has been traced back to the sixth century AD. Because incense burns at an

  -90-

  even rate and without flame, it is well suited for measuring the division of the religious day and for other purposes. Indeed, incense-clocks appear to have been as extensively used by the Chinese as sundials and clepsydrae. Both incense sticks and graduated candles were in common use for time measurement during the Sung dynasty ( AD 960-1279), and both were later introduced into Japan. Silvio Bedini has commented that 'although the invention of the candle timepiece has been traditionally ascribed to Alfred the Great of England, it obviously had an earlier history in the Orient'.7 Because it is inexpensive, burning incense-sticks to tell the time continued to be used down to the present century. In some of these clocks different pieces of incense gave off different aromas, thereby enabling those with sensitive noses to tell the approximate time.

  The Chinese attitude to history was based on the belief that the rise and fall of dynasties was controlled by the mandate of Heaven. A man of modest birth might secure this mandate and become the Son of Heaven, or priest-king, but when his descendants displayed a lack of proper reverence for his example they lost the support of Heaven and their dynasty collapsed. Once the sign of Heaven was clear, there was then nothing disloyal in transferring allegiance to a new emperor, for he was blessed by the ancestral spirits of China. Thus in China the past had a definite social purpose, its use depending essentially on the concept of the mandate of Heaven to ensure continuity in a world of political change. J. H. Plumb has raised the interesting question 'Why did history develop in Europe, whereas in China it never extracted itself from the iron grip of the past in the service of the present?'8 For, despite acquiring a mass of archival material stretching over a very long period of time, the Chinese never developed anything corresponding to the modern Western concept of history. In Plumb's opinion, 'What closed their minds to the historical problem was its absence.' The European past, with its record of interaction between conflicting civilizations, religions, and cultures, lacked the unity and 'all-embracing certainty' of the Chinese and so presented historical problems of a kind the latter never encountered. Moreover, in China there was nothing corresponding to the secularization of history in Europe after the domination of the Church ended with the Renaissance and Reformation. China maintained bureaucratic control of both historical materials and their interpretation, whereas in Europe historical criticism had a much freer opportunity to develop.

  As regards the philosophical concept of time, according to Needham, the Mohist school (followers of the philosopher Mo Ti in the fifth century BC) was inclined to temporal atomicity, although the hypothesis

  -91-

  of material atomism never played any significant role in Chinese thought, which was wedded to the idea of the continuum.9 More remarkably, the Mohists appear to have been near to formulating the concept of functional dependence in the relation of motion to time, an idea that was not fully developed until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in Europe. Generally speaking, however, different intervals of time tended to be thought of as separate discrete units. The universe was regarded as a vast organism undergoing a cyclic pattern of alternation, with now one and now another component taking the lead, the idea of succession being subordinate to that of interdependence. Just as space was decomposed into regions, time was split up into eras, seasons, and epochs. Consequently, as Needham has pointed out, in so far as Chinese natural philosophy 'was committed to thinking of time in separate compartments or boxes, perhaps it was more difficult for a Galileo to arise who should uniformise time into an abstract geometrical co-ordinate, a continuous dimension amenable to mathematical handling'.10

  China was so remote from Europe that when silk first became available for the wealthier cla
sses in Imperial Rome no one knew where it came from, but the fact that it reached Rome shows that these two civilizations were not totally devoid of contact with each other. In the Middle Ages a stream of inventions, such as gunpowder, paper, and the mariner's compass, passed from China to Europe.

  The Maya

  A civilization which paid particular attention to time but was destined, however, to remain totally isolated from both Europe and Asia until long after its decline--it reached its peak between about AD 600 and 900--was that of the Maya of Mesoamerica. The Maya were an agricultural people who had to contend with a capricious climate. They must have felt the need for a farmer's almanac and so started to keep a tally of days, which they recorded with special symbols. As regards their gods, benevolent ones were honoured, whereas those of an equivocal nature had to be appeased at the appropriate times. It was even more important to know when evil gods would be in charge so as to avoid trouble as far as possible by doing nothing at such times. In response to these needs a calendrical system of considerable complexity was devised. This was facilitated by the development of a remarkable notation for numbers, the Maya being among the most numerate civilizations there have ever been. They used the concept of place value and also had a symbol for zero.

  -92-

  Instead of a decimal system like ours or a sexagesimal system like the Babylonian, the Maya worked with a system of numeration based on the number twenty. There were twenty days in the month, each being regarded as divine and of distinctive omen. Thirteen months of twenty days gave a cycle of 260 days that formed the core of the Maya almanac. It has been suggested that the reason for this choice may have been that the longer of the two annual intervals between successive zenith-transits of the sun in the neighbourhood of Copan (one of the most important Maya cities) at latitude 15 degrees north is 260 days.11 The 260 days of the sacred year each had a number from one to thirteen attached to it and there were also twenty different day-names, arranged so that the same combination of number and name only came round again 260 days later. The god of the day of the 260-day cycle on which a man was born was his patron saint or guardian deity. There is evidence that it became the practice for individuals to be named after the day on which they were born and that couples were not allowed to marry if their birthdays had the same numeral.12

  Besides the 260-day cycle (or 'Sacred Year') the Maya had a solar year of 365 days, known to archaeologists as the 'Vague Year', composed of eighteen months of twenty days each and five intercalary days. The next largest cycle in the Maya 'Calendar Round' contained 18,980 days, corresponding to the period when the 260-day and 365-day cycles meshed together. The number 18,980 is the least common multiple of 260 and 365. This number of years is equal to 52 Vague Years and to 73 Sacred Years. The katun, comprising twenty years of 360 days, was the most important unit of time in the Maya view, because the events in one katun were expected to approximate to those in a previous katun that had ended on a day with the same number. A notable feature of the Maya calendar was the era known as the 'Long Count', a day-count which began from a conventional starting-point believed to be 10 August 3113 BC according to our calendar. This may perhaps have corresponded to the last creation of the world, for the Maya believed that the world had been created and destroyed several times. It is now thought that the 'Long Count' was used to date historical rather than astronomical events. Since about 1960 there has been a great increase in our knowledge of Maya history. Many inscriptions on monuments that were previously thought to be purely calendrical are now known to commemorate specific events of historical significance, 13 but the only three Maya books that have survived are all devoted to astronomy.

  The most important of these is the so-called Dresden Codex, which

  -93-

  includes a set of tables for the planet Venus that is remarkable for its accuracy.14 This planet was identified with Kukulcan, the Maya equivalent of the sinister Mexican feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. The prediction of its heliacal rising after inferior conjunction, that is, its first reappearance as 'the morning star' after a period of invisibility, was of vital concern to the Maya, who regarded it as a moment of particular dread. Every Maya cycle had its re-entry stage on a unique day in the 260-day Sacred Year, the day of Venus being 1 Ahau. The main problem was to determine after how many synodic revolutions, or reappearances of Venus as 'the morning star', this phenomenon would recur on 1 Ahau. If the synodic period of Venus were exactly 584 days, the number of revolutions required would be 65, corresponding to 146 of the 260-day cycles. This is because the least common multiple of 584 and 260 is 37,960, which is equal to the product of 65 and 584 and also to the product of 146 and 260. The Maya priests discovered, however, that 584 days is a slight overestimate of the average synodic period of Venus. (The correct result is 583.92 days, to the second place of decimals.) They coped remarkably well with this discrepancy. Despite there being no fractions in their arithmetic and observational difficulties due to frequent early morning mists and much cloud in the rainy season, they ultimately attained an accuracy in the determination of the synodic period of Venus that was of the order of one day in five thousand years, that is roughly one part in two million. This degree of accuracy was attained in European planetary astronomy only in modern times. It was nearly twice that of our present Gregorian solar calendar and almost forty times that of the Julian calendar of contemporary Europe. For such a remarkable achievement the close co-operation of many generations of patient observers must have been necessary.

  Of all ancient peoples the Maya appear to have been the most obsessed with the idea of time. There is evidence that some earlier peoples in Central America, particularly the Olmec, were also concerned with time, but none to the degree that the Maya were.15 Whereas in European antiquity the days of the week were regarded as being under the influence of the principal heavenly bodies--Saturn-day, Sun-day, Moon-day, and so on--for the Maya each day was itself divine. The Maya pictured the divisions of time as burdens carried by a hierarchy of divine bearers who personified the respective numbers by which the different periods of time--days, months, years, etc.--were distinguished. The burdens were carried on the back, the weight being supported by a tump-line across the forehead. There were momentary pauses at the end of each prescribed

  -94-

  period when one god with his burden succeeded another. A graphic description of this theme has been given by one of the foremost experts on the Maya, J. E. S. Thompson:

  One god raises his hand to the tump-line to slip it off his forehead, whereas others have slipped off their load, and hold them in their laps. The night god, who takes over when the day is done, is in the act of rising with his load. With his left hand he eases the weight on the tump-line; with his right hand on the ground he steadies himself as he starts to rise. The artist conveys in the strain reflected in the god's features the physical effort of rising from the ground with his heavy load. It is the typical scene of the Indian carrier resuming his journey familiar to anyone who has visited the Guatemalan highlands.16

  Despite their constant preoccupation with temporal phenomena, the Maya never attained the idea of time as the journey of a single bearer with his load. Their conception of time was magical and polytheistic. The road along which the divine bearers marched in relays had neither beginning nor end. Events moved in a circle represented by the recurring spells of duty for each god in the succession of bearers. Days, months, years, and so on were all members of relay teams marching through eternity. Each god's burden came to signify the particular omen of the division of time in question. One year the burden might be drought, another a good harvest, and so on. By calculating which gods would be marching together on a given day, the priests could determine the combined influence of all marchers and thus forecast the fate of mankind. The hierarchy of cycles for each division of time led the Maya to devote more attention to the past than to the future. For although the particular details might vary, history was expected to repeat itself in each katun, and s
ignificant events would follow the pre-ordained general pattern. Thus, in the Maya world-view there was no sense of progress but only a blending of past, present, and future, which all tended to become one.

  Classic Maya civilization appears to have collapsed some 600 years before the Spanish conquest of Central America, but even if it had survived it seems inevitable that the Maya obsession with time would have remained a historical curiosity with no influence on the modern world. For, despite the remarkable mathematical and astronomical expertise displayed by the Maya priests, their mental outlook was magical and not scientific. They were far more interested in time than were the Greeks, but the fact that every moment was regarded as the manifestation of supernatural forces meant that the concept of time which dominated Maya thought was purely astrological. A civilization

  -95-

  that never invented the wheel was automatically precluded from inventing the mechanical clock,17 but in fact neither the sundial nor the water-clock appear to have been developed by the Maya for measuring the passage of time. In short, they had the calendar but not the clock.

  The author of a recent book on the history of clocks and their influence on the modern world has remarked that anyone looking at the techniques of time measurement throughout the world in, say, the eleventh century 'would have given odds that the Chinese would develop a mechanical clock well before the Europeans'.18 On the contrary, Chinese horological techniques did not advance, and when the Jesuits brought their clocks to China in the sixteenth century the inventions of Su Sung and others had long been forgotten. Like the precise astronomical observations of the Maya, these technical achievements proved to be a dead end. Instead, it was in western Europe that the mechanical clock first appeared and with it a new type of civilization based on the measurement of time.