The Invention of Timekeeping, From Sunlight to School Bells
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme:
Crayons, Clocks, and Spelling Tests: The Human Stories Behind Everyday School Subjects
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,200 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re uncovering the hidden stories behind everyday school subjects — those lessons we often take for granted in elementary or secondary school, without stopping to ask how they became “correct” in the first place.
In our first newsletter, we discussed the history of spelling.
Last week, we explored the history of counting.
Today, we’re timekeeping.
Like counting, the concept of time may feel natural or universal. One minute is 60 seconds. There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week.
I remember learning to tell time, on a white-faced clock, with a “big hand,” a "small hand,” and a red ticking second hand. Nowadays, in some schools, teaching students to read analog clocks is on the decline.
But beyond the realm of analog vs digital clocks, not everyone experiences time in the same way.
Like spelling and counting, timekeeping is a human-made system — one with its own history.
So, who decided how we keep and measure time?
What happens when one system becomes “standard”?
How does timekeeping shape power, culture, and daily lives?
And do the ways we tell time shape — or even control — our rhythms?
Ancient Ways of Telling Time, Observing the Skies
Time wasn't always measured in hours, minutes, and seconds. Early humans used nature itself to track time — primarily by observing the sky.
Sun dials were created to capture the sun’s movement and divide the day. Monuments — like Stonehenge, in current-day England, and Woodhenge in Cahokia, or modern-day Illinois, U.S. — were likely constructed to align with solar events, particularly solstices and equinoxes. But these were relatively recent developments in the context of human history.
Long before clocks, calendars, and monuments, humans likely used the moon to mark time — tens of thousands of years before formal solar calendars emerged. With a face that changes nightly and across seasons, the moon is an "obvious timepiece.”
These natural cycles helped mark important rhythms, including — once humans began to farm — eventual agricultural seasons for planting and harvesting, as well as sacred moments tied to spiritual beliefs.
Many ancient and Indigenous cultures developed lunar-based calendars, including — but not limited to — the Babylonian, Chinese, Islamic, Hebrew, Maya, Yorùbá, and Algonquian calendars. Even today, lunar months influence major religious and cultural observances such as Eid al-Fitr, Rosh Hashanah, and Lunar New Year celebrations originating across East and Southeast Asia (e.g., Chinese New Year, Tết, Seollal).
The Introduction of Clocks
As human societies continued to evolve, people began crafting tools and machines to measure time more precisely — or outside of the light of the sun and moon. These early timepieces not only reflected cultural priorities and environmental adaptations, they also showcased scientific innovation.
In Ancient Egypt sundials were used to track daylight hours, while water clocks allowed people to measure time, even in the dark or indoors. By 1400 BCE, these devices — typically vessels made of clay or stone, with a hole carved at the bottom — worked by controlling the flow of water from one vessel to another, with markings to roughly measure intervals of time. But what happened if the water froze?
In Ancient China, the challenge of freezing water and colder climates led to a striking innovation in the 10th century CE. Engineer and astronomer Zhang Sixun developed a mercury-powered clock, replacing water with liquid mercury — a substance that remained fluid even in the cold (which is why mercury is also used in thermometers).
Across East Asia, incense clocks were used in temples and homes. Likely invented around a millennium ago, these clocks burned incense in carefully measured patterns and cords. In some cases, different scents of incense were used to indicate a specific time, or signal the start of an event.
During the Islamic Golden Age (800–1300c CE), scholars made major advances in astronomical timekeeping. While the astrolabe may have originated in the Greco-Roman world, it was refined and widely distributed across the Islamic empire. A versatile tool that blended science, religion, and art, the astrolabe tracked celestial bodies, determined prayer times and direction, and supported navigation based on latitude.
Around 250–900 CE, the Maya developed on one of the most complex and accurate calendar systems the world has ever seen. Their understanding of cyclical time — with interlocking calendars that marked daily life and cosmic events — was rooted in deep observation of the sun, moon, Venus, and the stars.
How Time Became Standardized
For most of human history, time was measured locally. However, through globalization and colonization, the need or desire for a universal system emerged.
The first mechanical clocks — which some argue were created in ancient China, and others place their origin in 13-14th century Europe — marked a shift in timekeeping. Powered by gears and weights, these large, expensive clocks were mostly limited to churches and town halls.
During the Industrial Revolution (18th-19th centuries CE), factories needed synchronized time to manage labor. Rigid schedules, dedicated by whistles and timecards, became standard. Schools adopted a similar model, structuring a student’s day with tight schedules and bells.
The advent of railroads and train schedules further accelerated the need for a consistent timekeeping system. In 1884, the Prime Meridian Conference established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), creating time zones to coordinate global trade and travel.
As standardized time spread, it began to overshadow nature-based, relational systems of time. Indigenous and other cultural knowledge systems— which often tracked time through the moon, seasons, migrations, and agricultural cycles — were largely replaced.
With colonization, clock time replaced these systems, eclipsed sky- and earth- based ways of knowing.
As the world adopted standardized time, clock-based time was viewed as the "legitimate" method, in many ways, disrupting ancient, cyclical understanding of time and more earthly, celestial ways of marking its passage.
Expanding How We Honor Time
Many communities still measure time not by mechanical clocks, but by natural events, seasons, and cultural rhythms.
Māori Maramataka: A lunar calendar guiding farming and fishing, now being revised as part of cultural renewal.
Indigenous Australians: Dreamtime refers to a spiritual realm and the time of creation, not as a distant past, but as something that persists, continues — “continuum of past, present and future.” Here, time is cyclical, and spiritual forces continue to influence the world.
Jewish Shabbat: A weekly sacred pause from Friday evening to Saturday night, marking time in a way that transcends the clock.
Islamic Prayer Times: Five daily prayers, each set by the position of the sun.
Ifugao (Philippines): Time follows agricultural cycles and oral traditions, with life events linked to planting and harvest seasons. Time is also recorded using knotted cords, an ancient method.
Rooted in nature and community, these time systems offer alternatives to the standardized clock, reflecting ways of understanding time that are more fluid, relational, and ancestral.
Time Today
Today, we live in a world of atomic clocks and nanoseconds.
Digital calendars, productivity apps, and screen time dominate many of our lives. Yet, there’s also a resurgence of slow movements, viewing rest as a form of resistance.
Is it possible to imagine a non-linear time system? One that prioritizes community, natural rhythms, and collective well-being — for at least part of the time?
Who will decide what time looks like in the future? Who will own it?
And what might we unearth or reinvent along the way?
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