Time is a slippery beast. You may believe otherwise, if you
live in today’s West. Here, the moments march lockstep in time with the news
ticker, Twitter feeds and the stock market bell—every event branded with a
number. The precision of industry disguises the artifice that is our experience
of time.
In the world of our ancient forbears, however, we had less
evidence of time’s passage. The seasons flowed one into another with each
year’s refrain, and the phases of the moon signaled the strength of the tides. When
those cultures saw fit to measure these intervals, they faced a panoply of
decisions in the face of the elements. As civilizations grew, they sometimes
saw fit to change those decisions and alter their measure of time. The
Renaissance saw at least one such change to fruition.
