Timekeeping Is A Universal Human Obsession

For many of us, this is a part of the year when we are acutely aware of time and timekeeping, even more so than usual. Thanks in part to the changing of clocks I talked about in my last post, it gets dark much earlier, and there’s another month or so to go of the days getting shorter and the nights longer (in the northern hemisphere, anyway; if you’re in most of South America, much of Africa, or Australia, enjoy your long summer days...). We’re also coming into the cluster of solstice-related holidays— Hanukkah started last night, and Christmas is fast approaching— so a lot of kids are counting down days, and adults juggling family and social commitments and trying to find time to shop for gifts.

The preceding might make this seem like a particularly Western preoccupation. That’s true in a narrow sense— the holidays of the moment are Jewish and Christian, and there’s nothing all that significant happening in, say, the Muslim world for the next couple of months— but in fact basically every human culture we know much about has devoted significant energy to the tracking of time.

The Newgrange passage tomb near Dublin. Inset: the author near the entrance, showing the "roof box" ... [+]

 CHAD ORZEL

For much of human history, this was a matter of life and death, thanks to the short days and long nights that make it difficult for an agrarian society to produce food in winter. For this reason, many of the oldest surviving human structures have a timekeeping function, related to tracking the seasons. One of the most spectacular of these is the passage tomb at Newgrange, near Dublin, an artificial hill made from 100,000 metric tons of rock and earth. The hill hides a narrow passage leading to a vaulted central chamber, which is aligned so that at sunrise on the winter solstice (and a few days to either side), a narrow ray of sunlight penetrates all the way to the center, the only light reaching that chamber all year. This clearly marks out the shortest day of the year, providing an essential reminder of the turning of the seasons and the promise of coming spring.

Newgrange dates from around 3200 BCE, making it one of the oldest such monuments in Europe, but it’s by no means a unique achievement as a timekeeper. Numerous other sites feature similar alignments with sunrise or sunset on the solstices or equinoxes, most famously the stone circle at Stonehenge, but also sites at Avebury in England, Knowth and Dowth in Ireland, Maeshowe in Scotland, and Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales. Piling up big rocks to track the passage of the year was a widespread activity in Neolithic Britain.

Marking these important points in the cycle of the Sun remained an important activity for thousands of years, and spurred other innovations in timekeeping across a wide range of cultures. One of the greatest achievements of medieval Chinese technology was prompted by an error in timekeeping: in 1077 CE, the Song Dynasty dispatched Su Song to offer winter solstice greetings to the neighboring Liao kingdom, but thanks to an error in the Song calendar, he arrived a day early, nearly creating a diplomatic incident.

CHINA - JUNE 25: Model (scale 1:48) of a Chinese astronomical clock, copied from Su Song's 'New ... [+]

 SSPL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Su Song was able to smooth things over with the Liao, and after the officials responsible for the error were punished, he set about ensuring that this would not be repeated. This project led to the construction of a monumental tower clock in the capital of Kaifeng. This used an ingenious water-driven wheel to drive clockwork that would rotate a bronze armillary sphere on the top platform to match the motion of the sun and stars. It also incorporated placards displaying the time and spring-driven jack-work to sound gongs to announce the hour, making it one of the earliest fully automatic civic timekeepers.

The human preoccupation with timekeeping extends well outside of Eurasia, and to events beyond the solstices and equinoxes. While Su Song was making his clock, on the other side of the Pacific the Mayan culture was near its peak, and had their own fascination with tracking time. They devised an intricate calendar system whose multiple interlocking cycles were misinterpreted as predicting the end of the world in 2012 CE, but more impressively they were expert observers of the motion of planets as well as the Sun.

The historic Maya manuscript 'Codex Dresdensis' is displayed under glass at the museum attached to ... [+]

 AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

One of the most impressive examples of this is the “Dresden Codex,” one of a bare handful of Mayan manuscripts to survive burning during the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1500s. A large chunk of this manuscript is given over to mathematical tables predicting the appearances and disappearances of the planet Venus. These tables seem to date from the 900’s CE, and modern calculations show that they would’ve predicted the dates of Venus’s rising within a few days over a span of nearly 500 years. Another chunk of the manuscript tracks the motion of Mars, and a third section is devoted to the Moon, including intervals at which eclipses might be expected.

These are just a few examples to illustrate the depth and range of the human preoccupation with timekeeping (shameless plug: if you want more detail about these and other examples, check out A Brief History of Timekeeping, coming in January). So, whether you’re counting the days to (or of) a Jewish or Christian holiday, or just until you can go for an after-dinner walk without a flashlight, you’re fitting right in with a timekeeping tradition that spans the globe and the whole of human history.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2021/11/29/timekeeping-is-a-universal-human-obsession/?sh=569671b52b64