Were Stone Circles Complex Timekeeping Devices?
[Music] it's widely believed both inside and outside of academia that the megalith builders in the neolithic period purposefully align some of their monuments with the solstices and equinoxes understanding these key points in the year would have been necessary for practical reasons such as agriculture but it may also have meant a lot to them for scheduling the rituals they practiced although we don't know much about the nature of those however it's not known how far their calendrical expertise went it's entirely possible they monitored hours days and months just as we do today when i was at the archaeology museum of palestrina in italy recently i saw some roman sundials on display and it got me thinking that the various mechanisms humans have used in the historic periods to track time could give us ideas as to how the ancients may have done it as well so i decided to look into that a bit further in this video an exhaustive exploration of every type of time keeping method and artifact isn't possible i'm more interested in looking at a few important inventions that are well documented that had a huge impact on society and that were relatively simple in terms of the resources they used the saying goes that there's nothing new under the sun perhaps the ground breaking creations that have helped us tell the time since the bronze age are just different versions of much older technology maybe men here were just giant sundials maybe stone circles were ancient astrolabes that is not to imply some sort of technological continuity that's not what i'm saying what i am saying is that the neolithic megalith builders may have used similar methods but different materials to tell the time in the same way that later societies did let's start at the beginning of the historic period where we have evidence for the first clocks and move chronologically forwards before taking a trip back to our favorites the ancient megalith builders to see what we can figure out i'm talking about a lot of different things today i'm covering astro labs planetarium water clocks sundials and stonehenge join me on my little journey into the world of timekeeping one of the earliest time telling mechanisms was the water clock the earliest physical example dates to the reign of amenotep iii in ancient egypt so between the 14th and 15th centuries bce it was invented to help priests tell the time on a cloudy night when the stars were not visible so that temple rituals could be carried out at a specific hour this clock was known as the outflow type which meant time was measured based on how long it took for the pot to empty of water since velocity decreased as the water left the vessel but the markers showing hours on the side were evenly spaced the pots had to be shaped to correct for this the night was divided into 12 sections since the length of the night changed with the seasons there were 12 scales one for each month the longest and shortest months on this particular vessel now known as the karnak clock were the equivalent to our modern march and september rather than june and december as would be expected this is because the ancient egyptians had 365 days in their calendar but didn't account for the quarter day as we do so at the time this particular clock was created the year had slipped so that the solstices landed in march and september around the same time that the carnac clock was in use the babylonians were also using water clocks however no physical examples have survived they are known from references to them on clay tablets written in cuneiform which discussed payments made to guards depending on the length of shifts they worked instead of measuring time based on the decreasing volume of water in the vessel these clocks measured the weight of the water as it left the vars the babylonians split the year into 12 and assigned three stars to each month the day and the night were then each split into three watches representing the shifts that the guards worked these shifts were monitored by water clocks and the length of these ships varied depending on the season during the time of the ancient greeks and romans the water clock became known as a klepsidra meaning water thief in greek they made use of simple designs as well as developing more complex creations such as inflow klepsidra the inventors tessibius introduced gears and indicators many later versions of the ward clock were designed with aesthetics in mind incorporating sculptural elements and mechanical windows and doors in the medieval period the arabic engineer al jazari evolved the water clock to a new level of sophistication he added tanks which helped to regulate the flow of water depending on the time of year so the varying lengths of the day in each season could be accounted for two of his clocks the elephant clock and the castle clock are viewed as incredible pieces of engineering the castle clock also displayed the zodiac played music and incorporated a series of pulleys we could talk about water clocks all day because there are so many different versions of them which have been created all over the world but that isn't the goal of this video i just wanted to give an overview of how they worked let's move on to sundials once again we can look to the ancient egyptians and babylonians for some of the earliest examples these were referred to as shadow clocks the oldest one is from the valley of the kings in egypt and dates to around 1500 bce sundials work by observing the position of a shadow cast onto an object this object might be a disc or hemispherical plate and can be as simple or as complicated as needed basic models only showed whether it was before or after midday the shadow is usually cast by a norman as stick on the surface of the sundial however in roman times there were also versions which cast a shadow by means of a hole in the disc instead such as this one from palestrina the modern name for the city of prinesta sundials only work properly at the latitude where they are designed in 263 bce marcus valerius masala moved to sundar from catania in sicily to the forum in rome and unfortunately it always told the time incorrectly because of the change in latitude there's been a lot of debate about a certain egyptian obelisk erected in ancient rome that it's been argued acted as a large public sundial this 30 meter high red granite obelisk was originally built in heliopolis by pharaoh samtik ii in the 6th century bce the emperor augustus moved it to the campus marshes in rome and dedicated it to the sun in 10 bce this was the first ever solo dedication to be made in the city it was the ancient historian edmund bushner who argued that the obelisk was positioned so as to cast its shadow onto a layout of bronze lines and letters in order to tell the time he also argued that it was placed to cast its shadow onto the center of the arapasis the giant altar dedicated to the goddess of peace on the emperor's birthday both of these points have been debated since then and it's now thought that the obelisk did have time telling significance but only to calibrate the solar year with a civil year by observing the shadow of the obelisk on a meridian line in other words it didn't quite act as a giant sundial the obelisk is now in the piazza montecitorio however we shouldn't think that just because the obelisk in its roman incarnation did have a role to play monitoring the passage of time that it also had such a role in egypt in egypt most research concludes that obelisks often erected in pairs outside temples had symbolic roles possibly related to the sun rather than practical time telling functions an astrarium or planetarium used mechanics to track astronomical objects including the sun the moon and the planets the antikythera mechanism dating to the second century bce and excavated from a shipwreck is thought to have been an early version of one of these the history of investigations into the anti the cairo mechanism is long and complicated since its discovery at the beginning of the 20th century a lot of work has gone into understanding how it functioned and it took recent advances in scanning technology to really get an idea of how the whole mechanism worked since the object is fragmented and made of highly corroded bronze as well as wood high resolution 3d x-rays were needed to determine the complex set of gears within it scientists found that the mechanism was used to track the movement of the astronomical bodies as well as to predict eclipses and work out the variable motion of the moon caused by its elliptical orbit [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] you [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] scans also revealed thousands of inscriptions inside the mechanism that appear to have been an instruction manual for the device they discuss the movement of the planets and even list the numbers of their synodic cycles the more that the antithecara mechanism reveals itself to experts the more shocked they are since they hadn't realized how advanced the knowledge of the ancient greeks who invented it was it seems that australia didn't reappear until the 1300s when giovanni de donna created one which showed the meantime cider real time and movements of the sun the moon venus mars saturn mercury and jupiter those five planets being the only ones known at the time this is a common story for many scientific inventions and philosophical ideas which disappeared in antiquity only to reappear more than a millennium later eventually sparking the renaissance this only happened because ancient greek books were rediscovered and translated into latin but it's not as simple as that it's a long story involving multiple cultures scholars and translators and it's very interesting but it does need a whole treatment that's beyond the scope of this chat and beyond the scope of this channel really i do love all these different areas of history though before australia reappeared the astrolabe was a particularly prominent device used from classical antiquity through the islamic golden age and into the middle ages early astro labs were not mechanical but had multiple functions including identifying and measuring the altitude of celestial bodies above the horizon working out local latitude when the local time was known and triangulating and surveying certain locations on calm seas they could be used by mariners for navigation as well returning to the subject of clocks from the medieval period onwards numerous inventions contributed to refining its technology weights gears mainsprings and escapement mechanisms all help to create more accurate and more complex clocks leonardo da vinci invented a clock using weights and pulleys which i have a replica of in my dining room it was still rare at that time for clocks to indicate both hours and minutes simply because they weren't accurate enough all that changed with the introduction of pendulum clocks which used harmonic oscillation the first one was invented in 1656 by christian hugins this type of clock was so popular that other types were updated with pendulum mechanisms so what we understand about the history of time keeping is that calendrical devices have been in use in a variety of forms since the neolithic but evidence for the complex movements of the celestial bodies and the tracking of the minutes hours days and months of the solar year date only to the bronze age however the resources needed were not that complicated these days with computers and phones an average person doesn't really sit down and think about how they would monitor time without this technology sometimes when i'm hiking and my phone battery runs out i do think i wonder what time it is and i can basically tell that from the sun but i can tell that it's getting a bit late but that's it really and don't get me started on navigating by the stars i wouldn't have the first clue but many of the time telling devices from the historic period are really not that complicated so could the ancients have tracked time in a much more complex way than we understand today a recent paper in the journal antiquity archaeologist timothy darvill put forward the argument that stonehenge was a detailed calendar stonehenge was built in several phases and this theory is based on the phase between 2620 and 2480 bce when the trilithons starts and circle and station zone rectangle were all erected since the sas and stone structures were contemporary with each other unlike other elements of the stonehenge landscape darval argues that these sars and stones all made up one complex that acted as a perpetual calendar for a tropical solar year of 365.25 days the sarson circle is known to have had 30 standing stones originally this is based on archaeological investigations darvil sees these as three groups of ten based on the slightly wider gaps between these deacons inside the southern circle there are five trilithons positioned to form a semi-circle with an opening to the northeast the station stones two of which remain today are thought to have made up the corners of an 80 by 30 meter rectangle on the outside of the sarson circle one clear astronomical alignment can be determined from all of these assassin architectural elements a line oriented northeast to south west tracking the summer and winter solstices and that's been known for a long time darwil's theory is that the 30 standing stones within the sarson circle each represent one solar day in a 30-day month the three groups represent a week of 10 days each this adds up to 360 solar days the five sas and tri lithons in the stone circle would then indicate the extra five solar days needed to make up a tropical year minus the quarter day in such a calendar the station stones may then have been used to monitor the leap year that would need one extra day adding to it every four years since other megalithic monuments in scotland and ireland such as mace howe and newgrange were also aligned with this winter solstice davao points out that stonehenge's calendrical system could have been developed indigenously however its complexity is quite unique so he also puts forward an origin for it in the eastern mediterranean for example it's known that ancient egypt had a 365-day solar calendar during the third millennium bce and this also separated the year into 12 months of 30 days with an inter-calorie month of five days they also divided their months into three weeks of 10 days connections across the mediterranean and europe are known from the archaeological record pottery and jewelry have been found thousands of miles from their point of origin and isotope analysis of skeletons also shows that humans traveled extensive distances at the time so the archaeological record does also support the idea that a complex calendar system could have traveled from egypt to northwestern europe whether through knowledge exchange or the physical movement of people going back to my original questions could men hears stone circles and other megalithic monuments have been time telling devices beyond the usual claim that they were only aligned with the solstices and equinoxes did they measure hours days and months did they track multiple celestial bodies perhaps different monuments had different time keeping functions depending on their role passage tombs may have been aligned with the winter solstice that the ancients could carry out ancestry rituals at that particular time of year but something as complex as the callanish stones which consist of multiple circles and rows may have been a much more intricate tool for monitoring the sky the same could be said for the carnac alignments in france which is so vast i certainly think this is all a strong possibility these neolithic monuments have lasted thousands of years and in monitoring the celestial bodies over long periods such hard-wearing structures would have been necessary but mapping out whether such a function existed is not easy firstly it needs interdisciplinary input secondly many monuments are heavily eroded have been reused multiple times or have been partly destroyed making it difficult to work out exactly how they looked originally but this is an idea i've been drawn to for a while i simply don't think it was all about solstices and equinoxes i think the ancients had even more knowledge than that and i think timekeeping on a daily basis as well as much longer periods was important to them for many reasons survival ritual and probably oral stories of past geological change that they knew had cyclical significance so i'm going to give this a go and research it further what do you think let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this video please like it and subscribe to the channel find me on instagram and twitter i'm also on patreon if you'd like to support me there my website megalithhunter.com has further information on the sites i personally visit [Music] you
2022-04-13 15:07
