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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 03 Aug 2019

Taken: 04 Aug 2019

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Excerpt •
A World Lit Only By Fire •
Author •
William Manchester •
Second excerpt •
The Discovery of Middle Earth •
Graham Robb •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp. Inhabitants of the twentieth century are instinctively aware of past, present and future. At any given moment most can quickly identify where they are on this temporal scale -- the year, usually the date or day of the week, and frequently, by glancing at their writs, the time of day. Medieval men were rarely aware of which century they were living in. there was no reason they should have been. There are great differences between everyday life in 1791 and 1991, but there were very few between 791 and 991. Life then revolved around the passing of the seasons and such cyclic events as religious holidays, harvest time, and local fetes. In all Christendom there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or apart from the copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery, anything resembling a calendar.Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur. In the whole of Europe, which was the world as they knew it, very little happened. Popes, emperors, and kings died and were succeeded by new popes, emperors, and kings; wars were fought, spoils divided; communities suffered, then recovered from natural disasters. But the impact of the masses was negligible. This lockstep continued for a period of time roughly corresponding in length to the time between the Norman conquest of England, in 1066, and the end of the twentieth century. Inertia reinforced the immobility. Any innovation was inconceivable; to suggest the possibility of one would have invited suspicion, and because the accused were guilty until they had proved themselves innocent by surviving impossible ordeals -- by fire, water, or combat -- to be suspect was to be doomed. ~ Page 23
4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . Most ancient records of eclipses give the times to the nearest hour or half hour. Since sunlight passes over the Mediterranean at about twenty-two kilometers a minute, the margin of error is enormous. Timing to the nearest minute was practically impossible, which is why ancient Greek and Latin have no word for ‘minute’. The material evidence is barely enough to fill a small cardboard box. Fragments of four water-clocks have survived from Egypt and Greece. They appear to have been capable of measuring time to within ten minutes in a twelve-hour period, though more refined readings were apparently attainable: some of the day lengths reported by Pliny include thirds, fifth and nineth of an hour, and even, in one case, a thirtieth (two minutes). This would still have produced a very erratic meridian. The great advance in time-keeping came much later, in eleventh-century Spain, when an Arab engineer invented a water-clock with epicyclic gearing. But historical chronologies are changing all the time. As we now know, the same technology was already performing its clockwork miracles in the second century BC. Someone on board a ship sailing west in the Aegean may have known exactly where he was before Posiedon reached up and confiscated the magical mechanism near the island of Antikytheria. ~ page 100

THE DISCOVERY OF MIDDLE EARTH
3 years ago. Edited 23 months ago.

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