5 ms·
Anyone have a picture of one of those confounded dials? I was told that the Romans, traditionally, and still at the time of Julius Caesar, divided the day, fro
by bloak 7y ago
Anyone have a picture of one of those confounded dials?
I was told that the Romans, traditionally, and still at the time of Julius Caesar, divided the day, from sunrise to sunset, into twelve hours, so the "first hour" would be just after sunrise, but what astronomical local time that corresponded to would depend on the time of year. An ordinary sundial gives you astronomical local time. So I wonder how that worked in ancient Rome. Did they convert between the two systems, or did the two rival systems coexist? Did people have to say "the third hour, old-style" or "the third hour according to the sundials" ("hora tertia secundum solarium"?) to make it clear what they meant?
- CGamesPlay 7y agoI can’t imagine it mattered much, anyone they were sharing times with would be in the same city.
- Spooky23 7y agoCoordinated time has really only existed since railroads and telegraphs appeared. Prior to that, at least in the early 19th century, you used a local meridian (ie. local noon) to set midday. This automatically created time mismatch, as theres a ~4 minute difference for each degree of longitude. It didn't matter in antiquity as there was no way to communicate with that level of speed/precision! (1 degree is ~70 miles) There were multiple systems, for example the Hebrew day started at sunset. I'm not sure what that meant in Rome itself, but I'm sure it was a mess in the provinces.
- tim333 7y agoA couple of pictures of Roman dials from around that time: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/roman-sundial-pompeii-science-source.html?product=art-print https://fineartamerica.com/featured/roman-sundial-pompeii-sc... https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515149/rare-2000-year-old-sundial-sheds-new-light-ancient-roman-politics https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515149/rare-2000-year-ol...
- ginko 7y ago>Did people have to say "the third hour, old-style" or "the third hour according to the sundials" ("hora tertia secundum solarium"?) to make it clear what they meant? As opposed to what?
- projektfu 7y agoThe third twelfth of the day between dawn and dusk.
- cwmma 7y agothe sun dials they used were less sophisticated then modern ones and didn't give uniform hours throughout the year, according to Wikipedia, those types of sun dials date to the 13th century.