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Ancient Egyptian sundial (c. 1500 BC), from the Valley of the Kings, used for measuring work hour. Daytime divided into 12 parts. The ancient Egyptians were one of the first cultures to widely divide days into generally agreed-upon equal parts, using early timekeeping devices such as sundials, shadow clocks, and merkhets (plumb-lines used by early astronomers).
The merkhet or merjet (Ancient Egyptian: mrḫt, 'instrument of knowing' [1]) was an ancient surveying and timekeeping instrument. It involved the use of a bar with a plumb line, attached to a wooden handle. [2] It was used to track the alignment of certain stars called decans or "baktiu" in the Ancient Egyptian. When visible, the stars could ...
An Egyptian method of determining the time during the night, used from at least 600 BC, was a type of plumb-line called a merkhet. A north–south meridian was created using two merkhets aligned with Polaris, the north pole star. The time was determined by observing particular stars as they crossed the meridian. [24]
Timekeeping was important to Vedic rituals, and Jyotisha was the Vedic-era field of tracking and predicting the movements of astronomical bodies in order to keep time, in order to fix the day and time of these rituals, [18] [19] [20] which were developed around the end of 2nd millennium BC as mentioned in "Sathapatha Brahmana".
An hour was defined as one twelfth of the daytime, or the time elapsed between sunset and sunrise. Since the duration varied with the seasons, this also meant that the length of the hour changed. Winter days being shorter, the hours were correspondingly shorter and longer in summer. [1]
The time of day is sometimes represented as a decimal fraction of a day in science and computers. Standard 24-hour time is converted into a fractional day by dividing the number of hours elapsed since midnight by 24 to make a decimal fraction. Thus, midnight is 0.0 day, noon is 0.5 d, etc., which can be added to any type of date, including (all ...
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As measures of time, the rising and setting of decans marked 'hours' and groups of 10 days which comprised an Egyptian year. The ancient Book of Nut covers the subject of the decans. There were 36 decans (36 × 10 = 360 days), [5] plus five added days to compose the 365 days of a solar based year.