Seasonal hour

Seasonal hours are periods of the day and night, the duration of which depends on the seasons . They were mainly used in ancient Egypt . Their number is generally arbitrary. 12 equally long time segments per day and per night are called temporal hours .

Old Egypt

System of dean lessons

In ancient Egypt, 14 seasonal hours and ten equivalent hours were used for the time between two sunrises for the Egyptian day . During the night, the rising of the Dean's stars determined the respective time intervals, whereby the time of total darkness with the “inner” hours of two to eleven was divided into equal sections. The night hours one and twelve and the daytime hours one to twelve, however, varied in length. The use of diagonal star clocks on coffin lids of the 11th dynasty at the end of the third millennium BC. Chr. Attested.

Hourly calendar of Ramses II.

The hourly calendar of Ramses II gives an associated hourly division of the day and night, each covering a range from six to 18 hours. The calendar dates from the ninth year of the reign of Ramses II (1271 to 1270 BC). The hour papyrus , which is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo , was found by archaeologists in the Ramesseum in Thebes-West .

literature

Jaroslav Černý : Catalog des ostraca hiératiques non littéraires de Deir el-Médinéh. Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, Cairo 1935.
Christian Leitz : Ancient Egyptian star clocks. Peeters, Leuven 1995, ISBN 90-6831-669-9 .
Christian Leitz: Studies on Egyptian Astronomy. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1991, ISBN 3-447-03157-3 .
Richard Anthony Parker : Egyptian Astronomy, Astrology and calendrical reckoning. In: Charles-Coulson Gillispie: Dictionary of scientific Biography - American Council of Learned Societies. Volume 15, Supplement 1 (Roger Adams, Ludwik Zejszner: Topical essays). Scribner, New York 1978, ISBN 0-684-14779-3 , pp. 706-727.
Richard Anthony Parker: The calendars of ancient Egypt . Chicago Press, Chicago 1950.
Siegfried Schott : Ancient Egyptian festival dates. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz / Wiesbaden 1950.
Alexandra von Lieven : Floor plan of the course of the stars - the so-called groove book . The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Eastern Studies (among others), Copenhagen 2007, ISBN 978-87-635-0406-5 .

Individual evidence

^ Richard Anthony Parker: Egyptian Astronomy, Astrology and calendrical reckoning. Chicago 1950, p. 711.

[1] Richard Anthony Parker: Egyptian Astronomy, Astrology and calendrical reckoning. Chicago 1950, p. 711.