DESCRIBE THE INVENTIONS OF TIME KEEPING DEVICES IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND EXPLAIN HOW

EACH ONE OF THEM WAS USED. WHAT ELEMENTS OF THESE ANCIENT TIME KEEPING
SYSTEMS DO YOU SEE IN MORDERN SYSTEM.

The passage of time has always been a preoccupation of human beings, whether it being a
question of satisfying basic needs such as when to eat and sleep, the importance of seasons for
migratory and agriculture purposes or a more sophisticated measuring of time into defined
periods of weeks, days and hours. Therefore, do not be left out on this exciting journey of my
essay where I describe the inventions of time keeping devices in ancient Egypt and give a brief
explanation on how each one of them was used. The essay will also highlight some of the
elements evident in modern systems.

A hallmark of almost every known culture is some system track of passing time. It is thought
that, like most agriculture societies, the ancient Egyptians originally organized their calendar
according to the cycles of the moon and the agriculture seasons (30.4.2). Most scholars agree
that the Egyptian day began at dawn, before the rising of the sun, rather than sunrise. The daily
cycle was divided into twenty-four hours: twelve hours of the day and twelve hours of the
night, the latter apparently reckoned based on the movement of groups of stars (“decans”)
across the night sky.

Beginning in the New Kingdom (ca. 1500 B.C), there is evidence that sundials, shadow clocks
(12.181.307), and water clocks (17.194.2341) were used to measure the passing of the hour.
There is no evidence that the Egyptians tracked minutes or seconds, although there are general
terms for time segments shorter than an hour. The month was organized into three weeks of
ten days each, with the start of the lunar month marked by the disappearance of the waning
moon.

By at least middle of the Old kingdom (ca. 2450 B.C), and quite possibly several centuries
earlier, the Egyptians had developed a “civil” calendar composed of twelve months of thirty
days each (365 days), divided into three seasons-Inundation (Akhet), Emergence(Peret), and
Harvest (Shemu)- of four months each, with five epagomenal days (days outside regular
months) added at the end of the year. Official dates where expressed according to this system,
as a specific day within a specific month of a season (e.g ., Day 15, Month 3 of the Inundation
Season).
 It is likely that New Year’s Day (30.8.214) originally was associated with the heliacal rising of
the brightest star in the night sky, Sopdet (also known by its Greek name of Sothis or Latin
name of Sirius). In Egypt, this star reemerged after a seventy-day sojourn beneath the horizon
at about the same time as the first signs of the annual Nile flood that brought the life-giving
waters down from the highlands of Ethiopia. The correlation between Sopdet and the New Year
is based in part on an ancient text (from ca. 2500 B.C.) that reads: “It is Sopdet, your daughter
whom you love, in this her name as Year”; an inscription from the New Kingdom that mentions
the rising of Isis-Sopdet on the morning of New Year’s Day (ca. 1250 B.C.); and a reference to
Isis-Sopdet from the much later temple at Dendera (late first millennium B.C.), which says
specifically that the years are “reckoned from her shining forth.”

Since a true astronomical year has 365.25+ days, the Egyptian civil calendar fell back by a
quarter day or so each year. This meant that the rising of Sopdet/Sothis and the seasons of this
calendar did not correspond to the actual agricultural seasons for much of Egyptian history.
Scholars have attempted to use this disconnect, especially between the actual Sothic rise and
New Year’s Day in the civil calendar, which correspond only once every 1,460 years, to calculate
when the civil system was first established, but no agreement on this point has yet been
reached.

In conclusion the calendar is one of the most important elements of these ancient time keeping
systems that we see in modern systems. Clocks are another examples, although Egyptians
clocks where different from the ones we use today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kamrin, Janice. “Telling Time in Ancient Egypt.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art

History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tell/hd_tell.htm (February 2017)

Egyptian ancient Civilization.pdf