Harold Carr
Harold Carr
music featuring harold
home :: environment
Tue, 15 Feb 2005From my home office overlooking the valley I see the sun well. It's moving very fast - each day setting further north. Snow on the ground. More on the way. But it won't last long. Sun's quicker than snow this time of year.
Sun, 18 Jul 200424 hours in a day seems arbitrary (unlike 365 days in a year). There is some evidence that it is based on the Egyptian belief that the Sun-god, Re, spent the ours of the night voyaging through th underworld in a boat. The underworld was said to be divided into twelve regions. The god must pass through each, passing one hour in each - the word for hour was written as a star.
The astronomer-priest selected twelve bright starts which rose in succession through the night, and, calling the interval between each an hour, charted the progress of the Sun-god through the underworld.
In practice it was not a single star but a 36 constellations (not ours) known as decans, since each one rose heliacally (i.e., the first pre-dawn rising) for ten days.
This whole system is made explicit in the painted star clocks which were prevalent from around 2200 BCE, in which twelve star-groups are charted for each ten-day period of the year.
The division of the day into twelve hours was made by analogy with the night - the daylight hours being measured with shadow-clocks.
Humans observe patterns of nature and then use that knowledge to regulate our lives. Before writing, we built structures such as Stonehenge with precise astronomical alignments. The data necessary for such alignments would need to be collected across multiple generations, but writing, to our knowledge, did not exist at that time. This implies an oral tradition of astronomical knowledge.
Even though the temperature is 25 degrees and the ground is covered with frozen crunchy snow, today felt like the first spring day. Something about the sound of the birds, the angle of the sun, the sensation of the air on my skin.
Harold Carr
Categories
Archives
- April 2010 (1)
- March 2010 (7)
- February 2010 (1)
- January 2010 (2)
- August 2009 (1)
- December 2007 (1)
- October 2007 (2)
- April 2007 (1)
- March 2007 (2)
- January 2007 (1)
- September 2006 (1)
- August 2006 (5)
- July 2006 (2)
- June 2006 (2)
- November 2005 (1)
- October 2005 (1)
- July 2005 (1)
- May 2005 (1)
- April 2005 (3)
- February 2005 (5)
- January 2005 (12)
- December 2004 (2)
- November 2004 (2)
- October 2004 (9)
- September 2004 (4)
- August 2004 (6)
- July 2004 (2)
- April 2004 (3)
- March 2004 (10)
- February 2004 (10)
- January 2004 (10)
- December 2003 (5)
- November 2003 (6)
- October 2003 (17)
- August 2003 (1)