Time Reckoning

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”)

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.

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.

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.