Ever since the first symbols were invented to describe the passage of time, philosophers have attempted to understand and measure it. Now scientists can break it down with greater and greater precision, to billionths and even trillionths of a second. And yet we are no closer to gaining mastery over it. As we mark the end of another year, I'm pausing to think about where time is taking me.
Anthropologists consider that one of the most important developments in primitive human consciousness was the ability to distinguish past, present and future. It was a significant step forward for the hunter who could remember seeing an animal yesterday, and decide to build a weapon today so he could go and kill tomorrow.
Thousands of centuries later, the earliest civilizations must have depended on people's growing awareness of seasonal cycles. Nomads and simple hunter-gatherers were utterly sensitive to changes in their environment. But once they realized that the dry seasons followed a pattern and that adequate growing conditions would recur, or that migrating herds and flocks would return to the same site, communities could begin to plan, exploiting the times of plenty and storing their harvests for the poor times. They could build safer and more permanent settlements.
Up until this time, people were aware of the passage of a day, and had begun to measure longer seasonal rhythms by the solar and lunar cycles. From Europe we have archaeological finds dating back 20,000 years, of sticks or bones with scratched lines or gouged holes that seem to indicate the number of days between phases of the moon. By 4236 BC, Egyptians had observed that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, rose alongside the sun every 365 days. These time periods were designated by natural movements and rhythms: the change of light, the paths of celestial bodies, and the accompanying environmental changes which made these cycles so important.
But with larger communities there came a need to allot tasks, and people's perceptions of time began to change. Around 5,000 years ago the Sumerians, in what is now Iraq, had begun using smaller divisions of time. Besides dividing the year into months of 30 days, each day was divided into 12 periods of about two hours each, and each period consisted of 30 parts, each roughly equal to four modern minutes. This civilization probably needed to designate certain amounts of time for particular tasks. Something like the work week had begun.
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