Most historical civilizations, such as the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Greeks, Mayans… used natural measures of time. These include the day, the solar year, or the phases of the moon.
The Egyptians were among the first to divide the day into equal parts, using sundials for daylight hours and merjets, a type of plumb line with wooden handles, to measure nighttime hours. These latter devices, whose use is described on the walls of the temple of Hathor in Dendera, allowed tracking the alignment of the stars, as long as they were visible, to determine the time when the sun was absent.
Egyptian obelisks functioned as enormous public sundials, with marks around them indicating the morning, afternoon, or solstices. Anyone observing the shadow of the obelisk could tell what time of day it was.
However, it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that smaller time measurements became widely used. The minute and the second, as we know them today, first appear in the work published in 1235 De Anni Ratione by Johannes de Sacrobosco, a 12th-century English monk and astronomer. In it, he criticizes the Julian calendar and studies the division of the year, month, week, and day, introducing for the first time the minute as 1/60 of an hour and the second as 1/60 of a minute.
Four centuries earlier, the Venerable Bede (considered the father of English history), had written De Temporum Ratione, a work in which he analyzes all the calendars known at the time and proposes that chronology be established from the birth of Christ. In it, he says:
An hour has 4 puncti, 10 minuta, 15 partes, 40 momenta (Bede, De Temporum Ratione, 276)
In other words, 4 points, 10 minutes, 15 parts, 40 moments. Bede was referring to daylight hours, between sunrise and sunset. Considering that the length of daylight hours depended on the duration of the day, which varied according to the season, and that each hour contained 40 moments, the translation of a moment into our current seconds would average around 90 seconds (40×90 = 3,600 seconds = 60 minutes = 1 hour).
In 1267, the philosopher and proto-scientist Roger Bacon, building on Bede’s work, divided the day into horae, minuta, secunda, tertia et quarta (that is, hours, minutes, seconds, thirds, and fourths).
Nevertheless, until precision clocks capable of marking the passage of units like the minute and second were invented, ordinary people continued to orient themselves by the Canonical Hours, that is, by the ringing of bells calling for prayer in monasteries.
However, the moment as a unit of time did not persist beyond the Middle Ages. A good indication of this is that today, a moment in any language of the world can last as long as one pleases.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 7, 2018: Cuando Beda el Venerable estableció que un ‘momento’ duraba 90 segundos
SOURCES
Beda, De Temporum Ratione
Roger Bacon, Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, Vol. I: Opus Tertium, Opus Minus, Compedium Philosophiae, & De Nullitate Magiae
Wikipedia, Moment (time)
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