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How did people tell time at night before clocks?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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I remember reading once that if you time traveled back to Europe anywhere beyond 200 years, the majority of people would not know what year it was. All they understood was summer winter summer winter, someone born two years ago, someone died five years ago, that's it.
The church kept track of Holy days but even that was an ongoing controversy with everyone.
You could go back to 1123 and there might be a hundred people that kept track of the year but even they wouldn't agree with one another.
So how do we know it's really 2024?
By comparing historical accounts of known events with stable periods, like eclipses or comets.
I thought we figured out it wasn't though? If we were counting time correctly it would be 2028-2030 right now.
Faith and common belief ... it's the same system that basically works for many of the cultural ideas outside of actual science that we all use. Money, calendars, time, historic cultural units of measurements ... all based on belief, habit and repetition.
We don't know if it is actually 2024 ... we just have 8 billion people (maybe 7,999,999,998 if you and I don't agree) who all believe that it is 2024 that is all.
Huh... i man, I guess over time, timekeeping began to solidify. So when did we actually start keeping a common date? I know some religions or cultures think it's way off of 2024. But when did a strong common use of calendars come About?
This simply isn't true. People kept track of the year, even if it wasn't the Julian calendar, stuff like "the third year of the reign of king George".