by Adam Frank
FIGURE 2.2. Set of Harappan weights with scale. These polished stones mark an early step in human attempts to abstract material engagement by standardizing the concept of “weight” to make commercial transactions easier.
What worked with weight would prove equally effective for time. The urban revolution enriched our interaction with the world by transforming how time was encountered and used. The tokens of ancient Sumer were used to represent time in the same way that stone cubes had come to represent weight. While time is not physical in the immediate sense, as is a polished stone, it is nonetheless part of our encounter with the physical world. In our early evolutionary development, time was folded into the hardwired physics modules that Steven Mithen described in his account of the Palaeolithic’s cognitive Big Bang. By the era of the urban revolution, however, culture expanded far beyond evolution. Genetic hardwiring was augmented by the symbolic thought city dwellers had inherited.
It is during the urban revolution that the first written calendars and explicit divisions of the day emerged. The Sumerians, for example, used a lunisolar calendar, which tracked dates based on lunar phase and time of the solar year. Abundant cuneiform tablets show that explicit and accurate calendars were required to meet Mesopotamia’s agricultural, economic and political needs. Calendars were needed to time the tax collections that supported the sprawling civil engineering projects and hungry armies.14 They were also needed to set the timing of religious festivals with their explicit political function of supporting the king and his state.15 For all these reasons and more, the new urban cultures needed accurate calendars that matched the way they had begun to use time. To meet that demand, the properties of time would be abstracted and the human encounter with time re-imagined.
The material engagement with time meant dealing with its raw material—the patterns of season and sky. The Mesopotamians, for example, were aware of the basic astronomical fact that twelve months (measured by twelve cycles of the moon through the sky) and one year (determined by one cycle of the sun’s motion through the sky) are not equal.16 This discrepancy demanded accurate calendars lest midsummer months drift through the seasons until they appeared in midwinter.
To keep time in joint, a process of periodic intercalations was invented—inserting a thirteenth month into the calendars to set lunar and solar cycle in step.17 As we shall see, this balance of months and years through intercalation would haunt calendar makers and calendar reformers for millennia to come. Intercalation demonstrates the origin of humanity’s material engagement with time as a shared civic resource. As each culture evolved into greater complexity, its institutional time had to be hammered into a shape that could fit its needs. In the process urban dwellers created new experiences of time via tax collection schedules, religious festivals and periodic demonstrations of civic power. On a more intimate level, the shape of the lived day for the blacksmith or the potter flowed from new forms of material engagement that were possible only through new forms of social organization. Lived time as experienced from day to day also changed in ways as simple as the regulations for the opening and closing of a market, and as complex as the increased demands on the productivity of tradesmen as city-states grew rich from trade.
It is important to understand how these cultural innovations—created from new forms of material engagement with time—were flowing in two directions at once. On one hand, they moved downwards, shaping time in everyday life. But they also advanced upwards, towards new conceptions of a time developed in new cosmologies through myth. This process is fundamental to human cultural evolution; in the enigmatic entanglement between material engagement, culture and cosmos remains an open circle. Cultural change allows for the development of new kinds of technology (material engagement), which then allows for new forms of individual experience, which in turn allows new forms of cultural change.
A CREATED UNIVERSE: COSMOLOGY AND TIME IN THE URBAN REVOLUTION
Cosmological mythologies always change with experience. As the urban revolution progressed, humanity grew more self-aware. We were no longer part of nature but had stepped out of its frame. In response, the city builders invented a universe that, like their cities, came into being from chaos. Their cosmos were ordered, created places formed in the often contentious interactions of the gods.
There are at least three distinct creation myths from ancient Egypt, and each begins with dark, infinite, primeval waters. In these stories, the Egyptians imagined a cosmos that mirrored their own city-building experience, in which order was hewn from the cosmic wilderness.18
It should be no surprise that highly political city dwellers imagined creation stories of personified, deeply political forces shaping the universe. In Egypt it was the god Nun who embodied the primal, chaotic waters.19 From Nun emerged Atum, the true creator god, who would then spawn Shu of the air and Tefenet of the rain and moisture. Then came Geb, the Earth, and Nut, the sky. An A-list and B-list of gods then appeared, each one the personification of a different animate power in the cosmos. As historian of science Helge Kragh said, “These [myths] depict the universe as a dynamic entity, something which was created and is full of life, change and activity.”20 Most important, this activity was interpersonal (or between gods and humans). Cosmological change mirrored human change.
FIGURE 2.3. In this depiction of the Egyptian creation myth, Shu, the god of air, separates Earth and heaven. Ships passing over the firmament symbolize the day’s passage.
The cosmological myths of the Mesopotamians also reflect the intense, conflict-prone negotiations needed to maintain a complex urban empire. The Mesopotamian universe was ruled by three gods. The earth and waters were the domain of Ea, the god Enlil mastered the heavens and Anu ruled the air in between. Below these three triumphant high gods dwelt an army of quarrelsome lower deities, each responsible for his or her own domain of the universe. As in the Egyptian cosmos, the Mesopotamian gods also emerged from a primeval chaos. Humans, when they arrived, found themselves inhabiting a universe in which formlessness had already been beaten into form. Their universe was also a place of political tension as the gods’ endless squabbling shaped the day-to-day world humans experienced.
For the Mesopotamians even the creation of humanity flowed from political infighting. The Babylonian myth of human origins recounts the great god Enlil’s enslavement of the lower deities. For eons, the story goes, Enlil had press-ganged the lower gods into service for his incessant canal building and irrigation projects. When the lower gods finally rebelled, Enlil was forced to free them from their bondage. In need of a new workforce, he slew a single rebel deity. Mixing the ill-fated god’s blood with clay, Enlil created the human race, who then took on the burden of further shaping the world through canal building.21
Thus the cosmos of the Mesopotamians resembles the cities they created. No longer were humans enmeshed in the natural world, as they had been in the Palaeolithic. The era when humans and animals could speak to each other was long gone, left over only in tales of a distant Eden. The purely agrarian world of the Neolithic had also faded. Though many myths of this era continued to imagine a cyclic time and each year still required renewal through rituals, a critical change had reshaped those rituals. In the urban revolution the rites ensuring time’s continuity were now performed in the service of a king and his state. It was the institution with its presiding god-king that now required renewal and continuity. The state had become joined with the cosmos.
A critical aspect of this shift was the development of a priestly class. As religion became the province of the state, a trained cadre of priests emerged. It was their job to mediate between the temporal realm of humanity and the divine eternal realm of gods. In the great cities of Babylon these priests would become the first true astronomers, maintaining the first truly long-term records of celestial events. Such records were necessary because, for example, tracking Saturn’s orbit requires at least thirty years of continuous observation. Cosmic time and human time were explicitly joined as astron
omer-priests began keeping track of these long-term celestial motions across many human lifetimes. Though the observations were carried out in the service of what we now call astrology—predicting the future of the king and his state—they marked a turning point in our attitude towards the sky, and more important, our attitude towards the cosmos.22 The dedicated priestly class served a cultural purpose that was deliberately cosmic. In their work, material engagement with time would grow to new levels as the roots of astronomy as a science took hold.
MECHANISMS IN MATTER AND MIND: GREECE AWAKENED
The Antikythera mechanism, as it would come to be called, waited two thousand years at the bottom of the Mediterranean before its genius was revealed. Discovered in 1900, it was part of a first-century BCE shipwreck off the coast of a small Greek island named Antikythera. The mechanism—a mass of seawater-fused gears, levers and pins—was promptly packed off to a museum in Athens, where the discovery of its true astronomical purpose would have to wait for another century. Then, in 2007, a team of researchers brought sophisticated X-ray tomography machines to the Athens museum to create a detailed 3-D map of the device’s inner workings.
Within their digital re-creation of the Antikythera mechanism, scientists found Greek text engraved on the gears that read like a how-to manual from antiquity and made clear the mechanism’s purpose. It was an astronomical clock of extraordinary precision designed to predict the motion of the planets, the phases of the moon and even the timing of solar eclipses. It was a device of such exacting manufacture and design that it put even modern clockmakers to shame. As one researcher stated, “The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop.”23 It was as if all the genius of the ancient Greeks had been poured into a single object.
FIGURE 2.4. The Antikythera mechanism, a Greek astronomical calculator lost in a shipwreck circa 100 BCE. The mechanism’s gears have been fused by millennia under water. Reconstructed replicas show the mechanism’s precision in tracking celestial events such as eclipses.
There are simply not enough words in all the books written to fully embrace what happened in Greece from 700 to 100 BCE. The Palaeolithic, Neolithic and urban revolutions of the previous fifty millennia were distributed affairs; they occurred in separate places on the globe and along distinct trajectories for different cultures. The revolution in mind and culture initiated by the Hellenistic Greeks was a unique, localized flowering of human genius. No doubt the history of human culture has seen other explosive moments of creativity, like the Tang Dynasty in China in the eighth and ninth centuries, or the Renaissance of Western Europe in the sixteenth century.24 The Greek experience is still singular. The Greeks are our pivot point in the interlocking narratives of human and cosmic time. Across the loose association of city-states we call Hellenistic Greece, an entirely new conception of nature, order and time would be invented. The Greek genius for seeing pattern and order in the world, for seeing mechanisms in nature and fashioning mechanisms as the material basis for culture, was unprecedented. The vision they established would become a foundation supporting intellectual inquiry for the next twenty centuries.
THE PERSONAL COSMOS: INTIMATE TIME IN HELLENISTIC GREECE
The Antikythera mechanism, with its finely machined gears and dials, demonstrates how the Greeks imagined a well-ordered world in both matter and mind. The many histories, commentaries and theatre that survive from classical Greece also give testimony to a culture with a sophisticated sense of ordering time for its own uses. Nowhere is this order more apparent than in the seventh-century BCE farmer-poet Hesiod’s Works and Days.25
Hesiod’s Works and Days is an equal mix of poem and farmer’s instruction manual. According to Anthony Aveni, Works and Days reads like an “archaic self-help text in which the poet tells how to lead an orderly, structured life” in the mountainous farming environment of the Peloponnese.26 Time appears as subtext everywhere in the poem as Hesiod guides the listener (the poem was meant to be sung) through the difficulties of the agrarian year.
Hesiod begins the poem with the Greek version of creation mythology. The narrative tells of a golden age when the world was in harmony under the god Kronos—the embodiment of time itself. Echoing the earlier myths of the Palaeolithic, this golden age is lost through a steady decline into the silver and brass ages. In each successive era, humans fall further from their noble origins, becoming more decadent and more disrespectful to one another and the gods. Hesiod’s own era is named for the basest of metals—the iron age. Only through hard but honest work, the poet tells us, might the Greeks of the iron age redeem themselves and forestall the complete dissolution of the world.27
After setting the cosmological stage, Hesiod advises the reader on how to order their own lives, working from a kind of “morally based farmer’s clock”.28 Nature, embodied in celestial cycles, provides guideposts for ordering the work of the year:
At the time when the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas are rising,
Begin your harvest, and plough again when they are setting.
The Pleiades are hidden forty nights and forty days,
And then, as the turn of the year reaches that point
They show again, at the time to first sharpen your iron. (383–387)29
Here, Hesiod is using the stars as a calendar. The Pleiades are a clearly visible cluster of seven stars that appear in the constellation Taurus. As Taurus is one of the constellations of the zodiac, it will only be visible in the night sky for a fraction of the year. Thus, the first appearance of the Pleiades in Taurus in the evening sky makes an excellent and explicit time marker for the farmer. In using the Pleiades this way, Hesiod gives us an explicit example of material engagement with time. The seasonal appearance of stars is just as surely a material to be engaged with in the ordered world of Greek agrarian life as is the hard iron blade that needs sharpening.
Throughout “Works”, the first book of Works and Days, Hesiod provides numerous time-based formulas for sowing, reaping, pressing grapes to wine, taking to sea, gelding horses, even having sex. For bringing in the harvest, Hesiod uses the familiar constellation of Orion:
FIGURE 2.5. Early Greek representation of natural signs used as time markers. The text reads “Look at the swallow,” “So it is by Herakles,” “There it goes,” “Spring is here!”
Rouse up your slaves to winnow the sacred yield of Demeter
When powerful Orion first shows himself. (597–598)
Speaking of sex, but by no means love, Hesiod once again uses the sky to set rhythms. It is the appearance of the star Sirius (Seirios) in the summertime sky that sets both women’s desires and men’s failings:
Then is when the goats are fattest and when the wine tastes best
when women are at their most lascivious but men’s strength fails them
most, for the star Seirios shrivels them, knees and heads alike. (585–587)
As Anthony Aveni has shown in his book Empires of Time, the structure of Hesiod’s “Works” gives us a powerful insight into the Greek experience of time. As Aveni puts it:
Hesiod’s word imagery shows us that the early Greeks did not think of time as some abstract phenomenon rated on a clock, the way we think of it today. For them, time was the ordered cycle of sensible natural events to which human beings were meant to relate the events in everyday life from tilling the soil to worshiping the gods. For Hesiod the true essence of time lay in a dialogue continually going on between nature and culture.30
Thus throughout the poem Hesiod is explicit in setting the order of life in the context of both celestial and human time. The ability to relate the rhythms of the sky to the rhythms of experienced life in a reasoned pattern mark the initial conditions of the Greek cultural trajectory. By relating to the patterns of nature in and of themselves, without recourse to divine explanations, the Greeks soon would create an entirely new framework for cosmos building.
While Hesiod watched the natural world of stars,
weather and animals with a keen and discerning eye, it would be a mistake to see him as either taxonomist or a scientist.31 In his imagery, Hesiod presents the daily life of a farmer managing his land, mindful of the way time manifested itself through nature. Across the centuries that would follow, in the great cities of Greece—Athens, Corinth, Rhodes—a wider imagining of time would emerge. This new cosmic vision would lift Hesiod’s order of natural and celestial signs into new and more abstract realms. While the agrarian Hesiod was unconcerned with “compartmentalizing nature’s happenings into astronomical, ornithological, horticultural or meteorological categories”, the emerging philosophical schools of the Greek cities would do just that.32 They would categorize with a vengeance—imagining an entirely new vision of the cosmos and its place in time.
A GEOMETRIC UNIVERSE: THE ORDERED KOSMOS OF GREEK COSMOLOGY
For six centuries, Greek cosmological thinking established an ever more radical vision of the world. The flourishing order the Greeks injected into culture, arts, politics and daily life would be reflected in a confidence that the cosmos (a concept embodied in their word kosmos) was also rationally ordered.33 The city-empires of the urban revolution had created universes of myth where warring gods ruled the skies and the affairs of men. The new breed of Greek thinkers vaulted past this egocentred worldview and invented a universe of mind, in which the mysteries of matter, space and time itself would yield to humanity’s ability to reason.34
This idea took root in Ionia. The Ionians were one of three populations that made up the classical Greek world. Living on islands and coastal communities near modern-day Turkey, the Ionians were joined by a common dialect and a unique turn of mind concerning the natural world.35 The sixth-century BCE Ionian philosopher Thales began the revolution with a determination to explain the world without recourse to the gods. Using geometry learned from Egypt and astronomy learned from Babylonia, Thales revealed a new frontier. In 585 BCE he predicted a solar eclipse using only mathematical models for the motion of the sun and moon. Though modern scholars believe this story may be more myth than reality, it was recounted by later Greek writers to demonstrate Thales’ genius. Even if the story is not true, the mythologizing of Thales’ mathematical feat by enthusiastic Greek philosophers tells us a great deal about the swift but seismic cultural shift that had occurred in the Hellenistic world.
