Knowledge and Control of Time in Ancient Civilizations

1.2 The Knowledge and Control of Time

The fixation of events in time is the basis of history. Our solar calendar comes from the Gregorian reform of 1582, so named because it was made by Pope Gregory XIII. The day is a measure not easily alterable and is perceived by man. The seasons, although variable, are easily assumed by an agricultural economy.

The weeks are an artificial element, and months are linked to the moon. The lunar month was very difficult to measure in duration. The day of twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours at night seems to be rooted in Hebrew culture. The week, in the same source, is linked to the sacredness of the number seven. Religious influence and cultural habits have facilitated the acceptance of this temporary division of the week. The length of the months was set by observing the movements of the moon.

The wise priests of Babylon, the cradle of astronomy, developed the measurement of time by studying the movements of the moon. In the service of religion, the calendar was developed in Babylon and in primitive cultures of all kinds as a cycle of religious holidays. It seems that by the middle of the second millennium BC, Babylon already had an annual calendar divided into twelve lunar months amounting to 354 days, and that after an undetermined period of years, one month, the thirteenth month, was added to enable adjustment of the holidays.

The Egyptian city of Alexandria was a prominent place in timekeeping. The Egyptians had been governed by a lunar calendar, but it was not until Greek science arrived in that city that they developed a solar calendar. The Romans, meanwhile, began with a lunar calendar, but did so with 355 days and added a month of 22 or 23 days every two years. Julius Caesar decreed in 46 BC that the year would have 365 days and would add an extra day every four years.

Muslims have always had a lunar calendar. The ancient Arabs, like the Chaldeans and the Hebrews, interspersed a period of one month between the twelve months to fill the gap in relation to the solar year. Muhammad forbade the practice, as well as making a solar calendar. The Muslim year has twelve months of alternately 30 and 29 days, making a total of 354 days per year. So 33 years of the Julian-Gregorian calendar correspond to 34 years in the Muslim calendar, with a small difference of 5 or 6 days.

The Council of Nicaea (325) ordered that Easter be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). It is a moving feast that can fall between March 22 and April 25. Easter, the day of the resurrection of Christ, is the celebration par excellence of Christianity, and since it is produced, it defines the liturgical calendar of the Church.

The most famous opposition to accepting the Gregorian calendar took place among some of the most prominent figures of the French Revolution. They developed a new calendar, which included: first, changing the names of the months and adapting the order to nature and climate, the seasons, and agricultural activity; second, changing the duration of the weeks to ten days; and third, having months of 30 days.

Some primitive peoples of Africa have a calendar that determines holidays with the celebration of religious or magical events. In China, preparing the calendar had been entrusted to astronomers, but the initiative and the enactment of the reforms pertained to political power.

2. Egypt and Mesopotamia

The knowledge we now have of the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is the result of archaeological excavations.

A – Egypt

In Egypt, paleographers opened the way, and later philologists, with the discovery and deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. The riddle of the Rosetta Stone was solved by Champollion in 1823. The second major step was taken by Lepsius, who published his Letter to Rosellini in 1837. In 1842, he planned to study the Book of Kings in Egypt. The Books of the Dead, whose study was necessary for the understanding of mythology, were also important. Lepsius realized that without a good chronological structure, it was very difficult to establish the development of Egyptian history. Mariette was the greatest of the excavators to whom we owe the revival of ancient Egypt. He, along with Champollion and Lepsius, can be considered the trio of the great pioneers of Egyptology. Maspero, Mariette’s friend and collaborator in his later years, was the discoverer of the interior of the pyramids of Saqqara, where he met with numerous religious texts.

2.1 The Egyptian Annals

From time immemorial, the various Egyptian empires have kept records that contained lists of kings and the acts committed by some prevailing pharaohs. These are very sketchy stories relating to events during the reign of each of the kings. That is, they are contemporary events recorded by the writer himself and never collected from past events. They were called scribes. The profession of scribe was linked to the Pharaohs’ administration. The scribes of the administration were assigned to other tasks, preparing documents for the ordinary administration or general administration of the kingdom. They administered each of the documents made. Only a small part of that large quantity of documentation has reached us.

The famous Palermo Stone preserves the names, notations, and known facts of the reigns of five dynasties before its time. It was drafted following a chronological system from year to year. Other annals, among many, are those that recount Thutmose III’s military campaign against Syrian troops from Megiddo. This is again a narration of a contemporary event, written with a clear view to record the deed and the glorious events, but it is not research on past data aimed at rescuing the past from oblivion.

Manetho is the only Egyptian historian we have news of. Of his History of Egypt, we only know those texts cited by later writers such as Josephus, the Jewish historian, or the Christian chroniclers Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea. The Egyptians did little research into their past but kept alive the cherished religious beliefs and myths and legends of ancient times.

B – Mesopotamia

The land of the Tigris and the Euphrates was home to the Mesopotamian civilization. The first step in understanding this civilization was to decipher the inscriptions. There were inscriptions in cuneiform. In 1802, Grotefend identified three languages in the inscriptions of the kings of Persepolis: Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. In 1846, Rawlinson succeeded in deciphering cuneiform. The cuneiform script was common among the Persians, and Babylonian writing was known and used in Babylon.

Montesquieu

Montesquieu, an aristocrat with nobility, was chairman of the Parliament of Bordeaux. His thinking included, among other aspects, his theory of climates and his theory of separation of powers. First, as a major Bordeaux wine grower who understood international trade, he attached great importance to physical factors, especially the weather. All these elements served to explain the differences that occur in different societies. Montesquieu believed that human nature does not change—that is, it is immutable—and therefore no historical scheme may be applicable to any society in any historical period. Man is always the same in all ages while they remain in the same places, and therefore social change occurs as a result of migration and cultural contacts, especially those favored by trade. In his The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu explored these ideas in detail.