Time Reckoning

Over the past 200 years, thousands of books, reports, magazines, and articles have been published about ancient Mexico, part of the greater cultural region of Mesoamerica. Part of this is about the few ancient native manuscripts that have miraculously been spared from the blind wrath of the Spanish missionaries. However, what has struck me in the many years that I have studied these windows in time of the ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica is that little attention has been and is paid to the artistic qualities of the makers of these manuscripts. For some of these manuscripts can be categorized as "indigenous art" on a very high creative and artistic level. It is truly fascinating to see how much information these artists have managed to bring together in a logical context and in an often small space. There are hardly any images to be found without any kind of information. True masters of their craft, building on and refining age-old traditions and knowledge with very limited resources such as reed pens and a limited number of natural dyes. A very special example of this is page 1 of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer in which various philosophies, principles and ways of life important to ancient Mexican cultures have been merged into one scene, in a truly fantastic and harmonious whole. And all this on a rectangular piece of deerskin of about 17.5 x 16.5 cm. A true pocket-sized artistic masterpiece.

For the vast majority of people on our planet, calendars are an indispensable part of everyday life. However, the current calendars are the result of a very long history of creation. Less well known is that the annual calendars, as most people know them, are in fact a tangible and useful product of a carefully curated system of time reckoning spanning a much larger period, invented in their current form only about 437 years ago. The smallest natural part of any calendar or system of reckoning is the solar day, the beating heart of time reckoning. Hours, minutes and seconds are artificial divisions of a day invented by man himself. Under the influence of man, the day has developed from the irregular solar day to the current, smoothly running, standard day of exactly 24 hours, controlled by atomic clocks. According to many authors, between 5000 and 200 BCE the ancient peoples could calculate a solar year with a duration of 365.25 days. However, this requires a reference value in the form of a day of exactly 24 hours, which again requires a smoothly operating clock. And the old peoples certainly did not know that. Moreover, this period is based on the current Western system of time reckoning with an orbital period of 400 years, which the old peoples also did not have. In this discussion it will be shown why this assertion is impossible and it will also be shown on what this time span of the solar year can be based on. It will also address the misleading text that the spring equinox and vernal point are shifting due to precession. The text in this form is in fact only half a truth, but in this way it does appear frequently in the literature on the systems of time and calendars.

The I-tsing's Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas(Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan南海寄归内法传) describes the Buddhist monastic traditions of Southern Asia. Attention on religious discipline, I-tsing surveyed into the local time-reckoning system, i.e. the measuring the sun shadow and the reckoning time by water clock. These records are unique in the Chinese Buddhist literature or even the whole traditional Chinese literature.
“no shadow in Luozhou(Luozhong wuying洛州无影)”, initialed a hot discussion of scholars. While, the text covers not only measuring the sun shadow to tell the time, but also the method of reckoning the time by water clock, and the customs of pradakṣina(xuanyou旋右).  Previous scholars focused on the technology and history of “no shadow in Luozhou”, and here efforts focus on the whole text to show a background to the above discussion to help people to understand.

The article deals with an important problem of the international and Russian Egyptology, i.e. with the interpretation of a statement by the Alexandrian scientist of the 4th-5th centuries A.D. Theon on an era “after Menophris” (ἀπὸ Μενόφρεως), allegedly started at the beginning of the “Sothic period” in 1322/1321 B.C. The first part of the article analyses the polemic on the identification of the name *Μενόφρις with a specific Ancient Egyptian royal name, with special attention paid to the interpretations by the Russian Soviet Egyptologists V.V. Struve and O.D. Berlev. The former one proposed in the 1920s was largely based on earlier European scholarship and contained a number of errors, which remained unnoticed due to a decline of the scholarly criticism at the time. On the contrary, Berlev's view (1999) was totally original and in fact trail-blazing for the ultimate solution of the problem. The second part of the article proposes a development of Berlev's hypothesis. The epithet “Memphite” (*Mn-nfry) that backed the name *Μενόφρις and was originally applied to Zoser, the inaugurator of the “Sothic calendar”, could be transferred on an image of a great king that reigned in Egypt after the catastrophe of the Amarna time. This king could be considered the founder of the “Memphite time” in Egyptian history, the creator of the “Sothic calendar” and respectively the contemporary of the start of a “Sothic period” (Theon's “Menophris' era”)

Van de tot op heden bewaard gebleven manuscripten uit de oudheid behoren de boekwerken uit het oude Mexico (mesoamerika), ook wel codices genoemd, tot een zeer bijzondere groep, namelijk die van het beeldschrift. Van deze bewaard gebleven groep codices met beeldschrift is de Codex Borbonicus een uniek exemplaar. Deze codex heeft namelijk naast de volledige uitbeelding van de rituele 260-zonnedagen almanak en de 365-zonnedagen kalender met de 18 rituele agrarische feestperioden, ook een volledige 52-zonnejaren cyclus met zowel alle jaarnamen als de 9 godheden van de nacht. Deze combinatie komt in geen van de andere bewaard gebleven codices voor.
In de literatuur wordt echter weinig aandacht besteed aan deze in het oude mesoamerika van voor de Spaanse inval zo belangrijke 52-zonnejaren cyclus die nauw verweven was met de sterrengroep Plejaden die volgens de overleveringen bij het afsluiten van ieder 52e zonnejaar angstvallig in de gaten werd gehouden. Uit een uitgebreide analyse blijkt echter dat de op de bladzijden 21 en 22 van de Codex Borbonicus weergegeven 52-zonnejaren cyclus een groot aantal fouten bevat die in deze bespreking uitvoerig in woord en beeld worden toegelicht.

Chapter of the book 'Crises, epidemics and famines: memories of the Middle Ages'. The Chapter name translates as 'Among dragons, eclypses, storms and the end of the world: visions of time and its end in Early Medieval England (7th-9th Centuries)'.

Capítulo do livro "Crises, Epidemias e Fomes: Memórias da Idade Média", organizado por Fabiano Fernandes; Juliana Schmitt; Renata
Cristina de Sousa Nascimento.

The settlement of Iceland around year 900 demonstrates that the Scandinavians had reached a level of knowledge and skill sufficient to maintain regular ocean traffic and a co-ordinated society. A considerable part of this knowledge related to astronomy and other fields of natural science. This kind of knowledge was further developed by independent observations in Iceland after settlement, of which we have here dealt with one of the best examples. However, the advent of literacy and literary interest from the twelfth century onwards made it easier to obtain knowledge from books than from first-hand observations.

Among items of continental knowledge reported in medieval Icelandic manuscripts we find text inserts from the 12th century onwards describing independent observations of the annual motion of the sun. This choice of field of interest may not be accidental, the observer being located near the Polar Circle where the solar motion is both particularly conspicuous and important. The most important text insert is the so called Oddi's tale, a couple of pages in three sections, attributed to the farm labourer Star-Oddi living in the 12th century. The text clearly claims to be of Icelandic origin and there are no known foreign parallels.

The first section gives the time of summer and winter solstices through a leap year cycle with an accuracy of 3 hours. Its dating of the solstices is independent of the ecclesiastical calendar of its time, indicating own observations. However, the timing of the solstices within the day must be seen as an exercise in the Julian calendar which was being introduced in Iceland at the time. The second section describes how the solar motion increases in sight from winter solstice to summer solstice and then decreases to the next winter solstice. It involves an interesting mathematical method probably taken over from Europe, maybe only through oral channels. The numbers given are also of interest, indicating a mixture of independent observation and a predilection for symmetry and simplicity. The precision of the description is discussed in the paper in close relation to the symmetry. The third section tells us the direction of dawn and nightfall through the year. Its data depend on the latitude of the observer so that it is practically inconceivable that they should have been borrowed from lower latitudes. Whereas the first section of Oddi's tale would primarily have been useful as an exercise in Julian time reckoning, the latter two are probably related to navigational needs.

If the tentative analysis presented is right we have here an example of how the environment governs the knowledge gained by people. However, the initial seeds of an independent astronomy of the North were quenched by European knowledge imported in the 12th and 13th century. Thus we missed the opportunity to see what a full-blown astronomy of the North would have looked like.

This study examines the temporal structure of projected futures. The sociology of time is an established line of inquiry, but the existing literature lacks empirically grounded description of the cultural and cognitive dimensions of projected futures. When individuals imagine their futures, what is the qualitative nature and temporal structure of their projected futures? In order to address these questions, we used a mixed-methods strategy of interviews and surveys with 126 persons from a small college in North Carolina. We asked the participants to tell us about their futures. The resulting descriptions form a strongly chronological pattern. When asked about the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow or next week), they tersely describe the tasks that must be completed. In their descriptions of the near future (i.e., next month or next year), they begin to anticipate enjoyable experiences. When they describe the intermediate future (i.e., five to ten years from now), their responses are characterized by detailed and optimistic enthusiasm for the possibilities they envision. They pay little or no attention to the distant future.

Since Antiquity the reckoning of days, months, years, and whole epochs has always involved degrees of fluidity. Classical poets divided the mythical past into five ages of man, while astronomers developed increasingly accurate observations of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars to mark the seasons, the calendar, and to predict the weather and eclipses. For dating historical events, multiple time-constructions were used, including Olympiads, political and religious office, regnal eras, generational reckoning, and the Julian calendar. Attempts at synchronisation often conspired with political agenda and could lead to conflicting chronologies. With Christianity came new temporal problems, as AD dating began to dominate previous methods of reckoning. In addition, medieval Christians needed certain time calculations for liturgical use, including the date of Easter and the hours of the day in prayer. At the same time, they calculated and recalculated the six ages of the world and developed an elaborate framework for the apocalypse, the end of all time. By the Renaissance, the rediscovery of ancient time-reckoning and the origins (and ends) of ancient civilisations presented fresh challenges: thinkers wrestled with different time-keeping systems as they sought to reconstruct a historical 'origin identity' for a place or a city alongside the practical realities of contemporary Christian life.

Questions of chronology in specific historical periods (e.g. ancient Greece, Augustan Rome, medieval England, the Renaissance) have received a lot of attention. This interdisciplinary conference will build on these studies by offering scholars a chance to come together and engage in comparative work. The plenaries and papers will consider problems of chronology and the varied mechanisms for measuring and marking time in the pre-modern world. We seek 20-minute papers that pursue the following lines of inquiry in any period from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
– conflicting chronological systems in historiography, poetry, annals, astronomy, chronicles, homilies, and saints' lives;
– the temporal horizon between myth (or legend) and history in different ways of writing (e.g. historiography, poetry, annals, astronomy, chronicles, homilies, saints' lives);
– questions arising from irregularities, competing chronological systems, record loss, falsification, or problems of interpretation in pre-modern chronology;
– how historical time is defined and mapped out in historiographical and/or literary space(s);
– the regulation or synchronising of time and construction of identity;
– the representation of time in historiographical and/or literary narrative;

Abstracts (max. 250 words) should be submitted by Friday, June 15, 2018 to ConflictingChronologies@gmail.com. All contributors and participants will be required to pay a conference fee. If you are an experienced academic willing to act as a chair of session please write to the conference organisers.

The keynote speakers are Stephen Heyworth (University of Oxford), Responses to Caesar's Calendar in Vergil, Ovid, and the inscribed Fasti, and Roy Liuzza (University of Tennessee), Well-tempered instruments – measuring and marking the hours of the day in Early Medieval England.

For more information contact the conference organisers Helen Dixon (UCD School of Classics) and Rebecca Stephenson (UCD School of English Drama Film) at ConflictingChronologies@gmail.com.

Venue
UCD Humanities Institute Ireland, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Instititúid don Léann Daonna UCD, An Coláiste Ollscoile, Baile Átha Clíath, Poblacht na hÉireann.

Sponsors
The conference is generously supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities, the Humanities Institute of Ireland, and the School of Classics.

This research deals with the meaning, literary  and historical developments of four (Hebrew) time reckoning expressions who are mentioned in Tannaitic Literature: Cock Crow (Keroth haGever), Dawn (Amud haShahr), Rising Sun (Henetz ha-Hama), Shining East (Heiru Penei Kol haMizrah).