Clock Lord

In modern society the easiest way to tell time is to look at your watch, phone or car clock. But it wasn’t always that easy. Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians used sundials to tell time since 1500 BC. Humans may have been telling time even earlier in history by studying shadow lengths. Sundials may have also existed in China in ancient times.

Sundials were introduced into Greece around 560 BC. The Historian Herodotus, recorded that sundials allowed the Greeks to study the science of geometry, mathematics and astronomy. Later, the Romans adopted the sundial from the Greeks.

A modern-day analog clock is the closest cousin to the sundial. Analog clocks indicate time from angles, using a circular scale of 12 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds.

Because sundials are associated with passing time, it has become popular in today’s society to inscribe mottos which reflecting the instability of the world and the inevitability of death into sundials. A popular inscription is, “do not kill time, for it will surely kill thee.”