https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/to-cut-and-hack-my-days [https] Looking Through the Past SubscribeSign in Share this post [https] To Cut and Hack My Days worldhistory.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other To Cut and Hack My Days Timekeeping before clocks [https] George Dillard May 12, 2024 15 Share this post [https] To Cut and Hack My Days worldhistory.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other 5 Share This week's newsletter is about time. Do you know what it's time for? Time to subscribe (or, if you are already a subscriber, to consider upgrading to a paid subscription)! [ ] Subscribe As is the case with a lot of ancient authors, it's hard to get a handle on Plautus. If you've never heard of him, he was one of the most famous writers of comedic plays in ancient Rome. He lived and wrote in the late 200s and early 100s BCE and was regarded by Romans as a real master of his craft, following in the footsteps of (and lifting material from) Greek playwrights like Menander. But we don't know much about the man himself. Theater in this period of Roman history was a disreputable endeavor; citizens were not allowed to become actors. So he really only became famous after his death. Even his name is likely a nom de plume -- though his first name, Titus, is common, his middle name, Maccius, refers to a famous clown, and Plautus, means something like "flat on the ground." It's a suitably wacky name for a playwright whose work centers on misunderstandings and mistaken identities. We don't know about his life -- he was maybe a manual laborer who wrote in his spare time, but who knows? We don't even know what he wrote. Scholars have argued since ancient times about which of "his" plays are really his. This is especially confusing because many of Plautus' works are reworkings of earlier plays anyway. Oh, and most of the plays attributed to Plautus aren't complete -- we have fragments of varying size rather than full scripts. And then there's the problem of ancient humor. Imagine trying to explain a skit or video that you find funny to someone who has time-traveled from 500 years ago, or 500 years in the future. They wouldn't understand much of what you enjoy -- the slang, the sly references to recent events, the nods to contemporary politics or cultural trends. Plus, the Romans had, to put it mildly, very different ideas from our own about what was in and out of bounds for humor. All of this is to say that viewing a play by Plautus, even though it's billed as a comedy, might be interesting, but you may not remember it as the most hilarious night of your life. There is one passage, though, from a fragment attributed to Plautus that feels pretty relatable. In it, a guy identified as the "Hungry Parasite" rants about how much he hates the tyranny of the clock: The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions! When I was a boy, My belly was my sundial: one more sure, Truer, and more exact than any of them. This dial told me when it was time To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat; But nowadays, why even when I have, I can't fall-to unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials, The greatest part of its inhabitants, Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets. How many times have you felt just like that hungry parasite? We've trained ourselves to ignore the rhythms of nature -- the rising and setting of the sun, for example -- and even our own bodies -- I can't eat yet, it's not lunchtime -- substituting instead the ticking of a clock (or, in Plautus' case, the shadow on a sundial). I work in a school, where my every moment is governed by clocks and bells. I eat, go to the bathroom, and move from room to room when the clock tells me to. The time -- measured down to the second -- determines everything. My students will listen (somewhat) attentively to me if I am speaking to them 30 seconds before the bell rings, but try to hold them 30 seconds after the bell rings, and, well... Even in the non-school jobs I've held, the unfeeling, inhuman clock has ruled my life. When I worked hourly jobs, my pay was directly related to where the hands on the clock were when I clocked in and out. And even in salaried positions, I've often wondered which my employers wanted more -- my labor or my time. Finished with what I need to accomplish at 4:30? Well, I'd better hang around until 5, or my boss will get cranky. So time -- measured mechanically -- has ruled our lives for centuries. The measurement of time has also inspired the design of some remarkable mechanisms. This week, let's take a look at the development of the machines that have kept time for us, cutting and hacking our days so wretchedly into small portions. --------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Bible, there's a story about a guy named Hezekiah who is very sick. He wants a sign from God that he will be healed. He speaks to the prophet Isaiah, and Isaiah tells him that God will manipulate time: And Hezekiah said unto Isaiah, What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me, and that I shall go up into the house of the Lord the third day? And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have of the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he hath spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees. And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz. This is the first literary reference to the oldest, and simplest, timekeeping device. You didn't need any fancy machinery, just sunny skies. The oldest sundial that we know of was found in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt; it dates to about 1500 BCE. It's a pretty basic device (the stick that made a shadow has long since disintegrated): [https] Public domain But the technique is probably much older than that. People must have used this method of telling time since time immemorial -- watching the shadow of a tree or building move across the ground as the sun moved from east to west. It wasn't that big of a leap to manufacture a sundial and mark off the "hours" with a little more precision. Sundials were invented by most cultures in the world. Here's one, for example, from Han Dynasty China (the various squares clumsily inscribed on the stone are not time-related -- somebody tried to turn this sundial into a board game at some point): [https] BabelStone, CC 3.0 Over time, sundials got fancier. Here's a Roman one from modern-day Turkey which uses a "hemispherical" design: [https] (c) Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons I especially like this variety -- a hollow-globe sundial, which uses the light coming through a hole at the top instead of a shadow to indicate the time: [https] Zde, CC 4.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The problem with a sundial is that it only shows you the local, solar time, which varies from place to place and throughout the year. If it's cloudy or you want to know the time indoors, you're out of luck. People wanted a more precise method for keeping time, and they eventually realized that water would flow out of one container into another at a predictable rate, assuming that you control the size of the aperture through which the water flows. Out of this insight, the water clock was born. A basic water clock is, well, pretty basic. Water flows from one jar into another, as you can see in this example from ancient Athens (the bottom jar is a reconstruction). You measure the passage of time by noting the height of the water in the bottom jar: [https] Marsyas, CC 2.5 A slightly more complex version comes to us from medieval Japan, with water flowing from box to box down a set of steps: [https] Collection of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan This design is all well and good, but a flowing stream of water inevitably reminds us of urination. So why not make your water clock a peeing monkey? There are several examples of urinating-baboon water clocks from ancient Egypt. Here's one from the Ptolemaic period: [https] The Met And another, in striking blue faience: [https] The Met What's going on here? On her excellent website, Diana Rosenthal Roberson quotes historian Marshall Clagett: According to French-language sources examined by Clagett, "we are told that 'in their water clocks the Egyptians carve a seated dog-faced baboon and they make water flow from his member'" (Clagett, 1989: 148, quoting Leemans, 1835). Additionally, it was believed that baboons urinated at "'regular intervals twelve times a day.' One would suppose that this merely means that in expelling water from the clock beneath the seated baboon, the baboon is effectively 'urinating' the twelve hours of the day." Perhaps objects like these were deadly serious to ancient Egyptians -- the baboon was a representative of Thoth, the god of measurement -- but I suspect that ancient Egyptians derived the same childish enjoyment from a peeing monkey that anybody else would. Though water clocks could be very simple devices, some people created elaborate ones. A Hellenistic Greek named Ctesibus devised this beauty, which hid the water and used a series of mechanisms to translate the water's movement into the movement of some little guys up a pole (the clock, if it was ever actually built, has been lost -- this is a French diagram of what it might have looked like): [https] Public domain Another Greek, Andronicus of Cyrrus, designed the so-called "Tower of the Winds," one of the most comprehensive ancient timekeeping sites. This building, built in Roman Athens, was designed to help astronomers keep track of celestial events. It's octagonal in shape, elaborately decorated with reliefs of the mythical figures associated with the winds. [https] George E. Koronaios, CC 2.0 Among these sculptures are at least eight sundials that both scholars and passing Athenians could use to orient themselves in time. Inside, there was a water clock fed by a spring running down from the Acropolis. Not much is left of the inner mechanism, just a few holes in the marble floor: [https] MartinVMtl, CC 4.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of the coolest designs for water clocks can be found in the work of Al-Jazari, an inventor who served in the court of a small Islamic kingdom in what's now northern Iraq in the late 1000s and early 1100s. It's unclear how many of these designs he actually built, but they're remarkably creative. Here's a water clock that would make mechanical peacocks move and even sing at certain times of day: [https] The Met He designed a clock in which the flowing water would cause a scribe to rotate and point at the correct time: [https] Public domain And then there's his masterpiece, the elephant clock, where "every half hour, the bird on the dome whistled; the man below dropped a ball into the dragon's mouth; and the driver hit the elephant with his goad." [https] The Met In China, right around the same time, an inventor named Su Song was producing equally elaborate water clocks for the rulers of the Song Dynasty and their court astronomers. His greatest achievement was a 40-foot tall clock tower where the movement of water rotated a large, several-ton globe and animated little characters who appeared to announce the time by ringing bells. The clock itself no longer exists, but here's a modern diagram of the design: [https] Public domain --------------------------------------------------------------------- These primitive timekeeping devices were eventually supplanted by the mechanical clock. But that doesn't mean that people stopped making them. For some reason, there's a human impulse to make our timekeeping devices elaborate and extravagant, even if that makes them impractical. Just ask Al-Jazari or the owner of a fancy Swiss watch. So people continued to produce stunning sundials, for example, long after mechanical clocks had made them unnecessary. I'll leave you with a couple of them. First, this pretty hemispherical sundial from Dresden, made around 1560. I love the fine etching inside the bowl: [https] Public domain And, maybe my favorite, this pocket sundial dating to around 1800: [https] Walters Art Museum On the back, it has a little guide telling you where to fix the string to get the accurate time for major European cities: [https] Walters Art Museum By 1800, sure, you could have just bought a pocketwatch. But it would have been so much cooler to pull out your little sundial, orient yourself toward the sun, and get the time the way people had been since the dawn of civilization. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week's edition, there are three ways to support my work: You can subscribe as a free or paying member: [ ] Subscribe You can share the newsletter with others: Share Looking Through the Past You can "buy me a coffee" by sending me a one-time or recurring payment: Support me on Ko-Fi Thanks for reading, and I'll see you again next week! 15 Share this post [https] To Cut and Hack My Days worldhistory.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other 5 Share 5 Comments [https] [ ] Britannicus May 13Liked by George Dillard I read this piece when I found myself with time on my hands. [https] Cheers! Expand full comment Reply Share Haystack Calhoun Haystack's Substack May 12Liked by George Dillard [https] Al-Jazari's elephant clock an early Rube Goldberg device? Expand full comment Reply Share 1 reply by George Dillard 3 more comments... Top Latest Discussions No posts Ready for more? 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