wolram said:can anyone tell me when humans first used clear time divisions of day, night,
I do not mean terms like sun up or sun down, i mean artifical divisions.
selfAdjoint said:Well there are bones from the Cro-Magnon era ( circa -25,000) carved with notches that have been interpreted as counting days between full (or maybe new) moons. So "days" but not "days and nights".
At the other end we have the Babylonians around -2500 who counted daytime hours but not nightime ones, implying they made the distinction.
Somewhere in between people decided to count days and nights separately.
Humans first started using clear time divisions of day around 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians divided the day into 24 hours, with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.
Before clear divisions of day, humans tracked time by observing the sun's movement across the sky and using natural markers such as the position of the stars or the length of shadows. Some cultures also used water clocks or sundials to measure time.
No, different ancient civilizations had different ways of measuring time. For example, the Babylonians divided the day into 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness, while the ancient Greeks and Romans used a similar system but with varying lengths for the hours.
The concept of minutes and seconds was first introduced by the ancient Babylonians around the 8th century BCE. However, it wasn't until the 16th century that the modern minute and second were standardized by Swiss clockmaker Jost Burgi.
Time divisions have changed over time as different cultures and civilizations developed their own systems for measuring time. The introduction of accurate mechanical clocks in the 17th century led to the standardization of time divisions, and the creation of time zones in the 19th century further refined the way we measure and divide the day.