Josh Clark

So there was a big reason that people were keeping track of the hours in ancient Rome, especially by the time Rome came around.

It wasn't necessarily to keep appointments, although they certainly had that kind of thing, or to keep time on stuff.

One of the big things over the years in different cultures, it turns out, was they needed to time things.

especially for something like drawing water.

Like water was a communal resource and everyone had a certain allotment and they would divvy up those allotments, not by measuring how much water was taken up, but take as much water as you can within this, you know, before this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But in Rome, they had an extra reason for it.

And that was because the hours of every single day or the first 12 hours of every single day, because it wasn't initially that they were also like, let's track the nighttime too.

They just tracked from sunrise to sunset typically.

Yeah.

Each of those hours was associated with the different astrological sign.

It was called planetary hours.

And it was because so you could maximize whoever you were worshiping.

So like if you were worshiping Selene, the moon goddess, you wanted to do that three hours after sunrise on Monday.

And so you would use some sort of timekeeping device to keep track of that.

Yeah.

And the same, of course, is true in Islam.

Once that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sundials because they're, you know, have to pray in different increments at different times.

So it was really to kind of keep up with their prayer hours.

And they are the ones who came up with like if you have a sundial in your garden, it's a little thing, which we have one of those.