Rick Measham schreef: > In his question, he assumes that each period (night/day) should be > evenly divided into 12 parts. However this stinks to me! Surely in > the middle of winter, the hour before sunrise shouldn't be a heap > longer than the hour after? Surely the lengths of hours should slowly > decrease towards noon and then increase again towards midnight. I > figured this is a sine wave.
That would perhaps be nicer for us computer-owning people, but that wasn't how it was implemented in ancient times. It is really much easier to have only two different hour lengths per day. You only need two different clepsydras that way. And many people only used the day-hours; there were few public events in the evening or night: no electric lights. So nights were spent mostly at home, where the time of day was not important. So you could also define an hour as 1/12th of the day, and accept that a day isn't 24 hours exactly. But who cares, noone stayed up the whole night then. Eugene
