SUMMARY: Chrono-culture can be defined as the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices towards time. This is a sense in which it doesn’t seem to have been widely used – if indeed atall? -hitherto.
Though ancient societies displayed various forms of chronoculture, these were usually very different from our modern western attitudes. Temporal ignorance in various versions was a common theme throughout. Nor can we reasonably expect that we have reached a final true version nowadays: our descendants will more likely develop chronocultural attitudes very different to our own....
DEFINITIONS CLARIFIED
That the term ‘culture’ can be notoriously difficult to define is a fact well known to sociologists. In fact at least 30 different definitions have been proposed. Most of these however merely refine or elaborate on the central idea I will adopt here. So, for any particular aspect of experience, I take ‘culture’ to be ‘the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices’.
Further my term ‘chronoculture’ seems to have been used only in limited terms of anthropology or archaeology so far. It’s been applied when researchers seek to assign the relics of some ancient civilisation to their proper date in history. So that for examplepre-historians speak of the chronocultural sequencing of Stone Age artefacts from Britanny.
Here however I will employ the term ‘chronoculture’ in a much wider sense – as ‘ the sum of any society’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerned with time.’
ANCIENT THOUGHT
One striking feature of modern temporal studies is the amount of effort devoted to ancient or primitive time thought. The sheer volume of such studies can be taken as reflecting a strong suspicion that there is something missing or even mistaken about the overall modern chronocultural viewpoint. Or in contrast there is little similar effort to establish what the ancients thought about sciences like chemistry or geology - since modern paradigms are wholly satisfactory in such spheres.
In any case we can hardly know very much about the chronoculture of far prehistory. What we can discern is almost entirely based on archaeology. But we do know that humans were making weapons and tools at least 1 million years ago. Whence it seems they must have had some realisation of a future wherein these constructs would be used.
However tool-making is not entirely a human capacity as anthropologists once believed. It’s now been repeatedly demonstrated that various other animals, and even birds, can demonstrate similar capacities. Though whether this means that they too must be conscious of a future is still anybody’s guess.
People in any case began to concern themselves with much more than the immediate future at least 60,000 years ago. So much is suggested by various Neanderthal graves, which are the first known burial sites. Frequently these contained weapons and utensils as if providing for a world beyond our own. As such these graves provide the first suggestions of belief in an after-life, which extends beyond the individual’s mortal term and has been a prime constituent of most religions until recent years.
And some of these early Neanderthal graves had floral decorations – which must make our modern custom of funeral flowers one of the most enduring chronocultural customs of all!
TIME MEASUREMENT
By 30,000 BC in any case some Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) peoples seem to have been recording the lunar cycle as 29 dots, so forming the first calendars in cave paintings or scratched into small bone. Such was the contention of Alexander Marshack (1918-2004), America’s leading Ice Age specialist who studied the motivation and belief systems behind cave art and Palaeolithic thought.
Otherwise our notions of prehistoric chronoculture are based on observing certain Stone Age societies - like the Australian Aboriginals or the Brazilian Amondawa - which have survived in cultural isolation into modern times. As might be expected such societies normally reckon days by the obvious lunar or monthly cycle, rather than the much longer annual or solar cycle which is harder to record. Subdivision of the day is usually reckoned in terms of mealtimes, and may be refined in terms of altering shadows from sunlight.
With little or no concept of large numbers beyond 3 or so, such peoples usually exhibit poor sense of dates, the exact age of an individual, or the greater sweep of history. So that they are little conscious of time as we know it, being wholly unaware of its higher refinements and possibilities.
And yet such has been the chronoculture of all humanity throughout 99% of its whole million years!
AGRICULTURE, TIME, RELIGION
But with the onset of agriculture and more settled societies in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, early societies required more time-conscious attitudes. Good plant cultivation requires a developed sense of seasonal timing, which can only be gleaned from close observation of the sky where gods were thought to rule.
Wherefore agriculture, astronomy, time measurement and religion have always been closely intertwined throughout most of history, indeed right up until the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.
This four-fold inter-relation (agriculture – astronomy – time – religion) is very obvious in the first major societies we know of, beginning in The Middle East and especially Ancient Egypt over 5,000 years ago. And because its agriculture depended so closely on the seasonal accident of the annual Nile floods, Egyptian society was the first to employ a yearly or solar calendar, indeed one from which our modern version still derives.
The Nile floods could be predicted by astronomer-priests who observed the night sky very accurately. Likewise the day could be subdivided by observing solar shadows measured either by length or by angle, as indeed various 20-metre obelisks surviving from that period still attest.
But these first astronomer-priests also interpreted their objective sky-watching in more subjective religious terms. This meant that, apart from the solar calendar, the chrono-culture of Ancient Egypt often differed radically from our own. For example over the first few thousand years – say from 5,000 to 2000 BC - they seem to have had no unified chronology or proper accounting of historical dates. Apparently history was considered to commence with the start of each new ruler’s reign.
Further, as their surviving Pyramids and numerous mummies (both human and animal) still tell us, Egyptian society was hugely focussed on the after-life or next world which would come after this one that we know. And that to a degree which seems very alien to us now.
ANCIENT CHINA
Large scale organisation of Chinese society apparently began about the same as in Ancient Egypt, that is around 3500 BC. But, according to scholars like the late GJ Whitrow, the great difference was that the Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples. So they devoted great effort to provide chronological continuity between different regimes in different parts of the country, with works like The Book of History extending over several thousand years.
And by 1500 BC astronomers of the Shang Dynasty had amassed very long records of the heavens to show that the year was 365.25 days long.
Chronoculturally however such impressive accuracy in ancient Chinese astronomy and history was still inextricably associated with astrology. So rulers paid high regard to oracles, with divination ceremonies intended to fathom a future regarded as at least partly knowable. To some extent such beliefs survive in the modern Chinese penchant for gambling, often involving procedures which western wisdom would now reject perhaps too automatically.
High achievement accompanied by low superstition in China was again evident when Mandarin Su Sung constructed his great astronomical clock in 1084 AD. This clock took the form of a house-sized waterwheel – which advanced intermittently by just one step or ‘tick’ once a bucket was weighed down sufficiently from a constant inflow.
This earliest of all mechanical clocks was also strongly correlated with astronomy through a sighting tube pointing at some selected star. And it was accurate to a few minutes in 24 hours - much better than the first weight-powered clocks which didn’t appear in Europe until two centuries afterwards.
And yet the whole purpose of this magnificent mechanism must now seem ridiculous to the modern scientific mind. Apparently it was built to ensure that star positions would be known even if the skies were cloudy, so that exact astrological charts could be drawn up whenever a new child was born to the Emperor’s family!
Which again just goes to illustrate that chronocultural lesson already evident from Egypt: advanced development in one temporal region need not imply a similar sophistication overall!
THE MAYANS
The same lesson applies to the Mayans, whose foremost Meso-American society peaked around 750 AD. Totally isolated from Europe and Asia, the Mayans were one of the most numerate societies of old, though their expertise was mainly arithmetical rather than more widely mathematical. They used a number system based on 20 where we just use 10, presumably because they counted with toes as well as fingers from the start.
The Mayan ‘Sacred Year’ of 13 x20 = 260 days only coincided with the real or ‘Vague Year’ of 365 days every 18,980 days. But the real length of the real or ‘Vague’ Year was determined by prolonged astronomical observations on the planet Venus, and so accurate to 1 day in 5,000 years. This was twice better than the Gregorian calendar we still use.
Further the Mayans kept a continuous ‘Long Count’ of all days since the current world was thought to have been created, a ‘great cycle’ which most scholars now calculate as starting on September 8, 3114 BC.
But, as in China, such great accuracy was again very much contaminated by astrology. So each of the Mayan time divisions was assigned to a particular god who would carry the burden on his back before handing it on to the next deity. And since they were measuring time through circular recurrences, the Mayans also shared in that common primitive mistake of regarding time itself as circular So they expected history to repeat itself, with outstanding events doomed to recur as the Great Year came around again.
Such concerns also led the Mayans to design elaborate stone Calendars carved out in circular form. And yet apparently nobody, in all of Ancient American society anywhere, ever thought to insert an axle through the centre of such circles and so invent the wheel!
From which again we may draw the prime chronocultural lesson so evident throughout ancient history: High sophistication in one temporal region does not necessarily imply similar competence overall.
Which of course is also a lesson quite possibly still applicable today.
