why is the day divided into 24 hours, and we tell that time in 2 increments of 12? have there been other time-telling systems and history, and if so why didn’t they catch on?
In: Culture
The French tried it after the Revolution, along with revising the calendar. [Here’s the result](http://svalbard.watch/pages/about_decimal_time.html). Decimal time- lasted about a year and a half before they went back to the old way.
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There has most certainly been more ways of telling time. If I remember correctly our time telling system has to do with Egyptian astrology. Originally it was 360 days, based of the 36 decans (their most important star constellations, 10 days for each) and then 5 extra days to keep the years even (I think they considered those days to be when their most important gods were born, so Ra added a day for each child). After that they considered the night to be twelve hours, the day 10 hours and then two twilight hours (when magic was extra powerful, fyi). There is something about the number 12 that was important, I believe.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but this is how I remember learning it. I think this caught on like most other stuff Egyptian/Greek, by the spread of European empires and trading with the rest of the world. Unsure if there has been others.
Even in relatively recent history, not all cultures have used numerical systems for keeping time. From a linguistic perspective, there are languages that did not tell time with numbers until contact with Western civilization. For example, time telling in Hawaiian was not traditionally done with numbers, but rather through a very rich day part vocabulary that referenced sun and starlight and their interactions with nature. Rather than naming an hour with a number, there were several words for morning, afternoon, and night depending on the amount (or absence) of visible daylight and the height of the sun in the sky. Here are a few examples:
Po – when it’s dark enough to see the stars in the sky through the turning on the Milky Way
Aume – the dead of night before the eastern sky starts to brighten
Wana’ao – when the eastern sky starts to brighten enough to wake the roosters, and the sky gains a purple tint
Kakahiaka – when it’s light enough to walk around with no artificial light
This doesn’t answer the first or last parts of your question, but you can see that there are many timekeeping methods, even ones that don’t include numbers or time measuring instruments at all. Telling time with exactitude is something that is particularly engrained in Western mindsets, but has by no means been universal throughout history.
12 was the natural incremental number particularly in ancient Egypt. Where as we mostly count in 10s, 1 for each finger across 2 hands, Egyptians counted in 12s, – 12 knuckles on 4 fingers counted by the thumb on 1 hand
Sun dials. They only work for half the day, and so watches naturally follow the sundial and have a 12hr face. As others have said, blame the Egyptions for 24 hrs. 24 is a highly composite number very useful for easily dividing up into workable chucks. 1/2, 1/3,1/4,1/6,1/8,1/12 are all possible with whole numbers. They thought it was pratical.
There were several ancient cultures that counted by 12s (and 60s).
Further to the sundial discussion, there really only used to be 12 hours in the day. Since sundials only work in the daylight they would divide the day into 12 equal parts and then just wait for the sun to come up again. There wasn’t any way to track time during the night.
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