And to make matters worse, the French sometimes write am for ‘apres-midi’ - afternoon!
As I already noted two or three times in this thread: It was the Egyptians who divided the night and then subsequently the day into 12 hours not the Babylonians.
Sparc
Again as noted a few times: Counting from midnight is a modern consequence of the 24-hour system and was made common by the military. Fixed-length diurnal hours came about during the Hellenistic era and were derived from the Babylonian division into sixty minutes and seconds (cites provided twice already). Varying diurnal hours continue to be in use in some places all the way up to the 7th century, when the canonical fixed hours are established as standard through the church - they stole them from the Romans though. At this time hours are still counted from sunrise.
As to when noon and midnight became 12:00 for the first time, this happens sometime in the 14th century and probably had lots to do with the mechanical clock. This is not universal though, some clocks at that time still count from sunlight and use the seven canonical hours as base, which survives in parallel, and it is only around 1600 when pocket watches become more common that the 24 hour division counted twice from noon becomes universal (note that noon for a while acquired the meaning of both midday and midnight).
The name noon was derived from the canonical hour nones, 3 P.M. in modern division. This in turn comes from the Latin hour nona, the ninth hour after sunrise. Sometime in the 12th century the main time for church prayer shifts form the hour nones to sext (ninth to sixth hour) the name of the ninth hour is still applied to that time of day though and presto, noon becomes six hours after sunrise or the middle of a an equatorial day. OED lists the earliest known use of noon to 1140.
Sparc
Sparc, that’s just a little different than what you said before.
I believe that the Sumerians divided the day into 12 parts, the Egyptians borrowed that for their sundials, and then extended that to the night. Then, some clerk decided to standarize it. The hexidecimal stuff just got swept along, same as today.
Oh you people…How did the world ever agree on the 24 hour clock??
Simple. It didn’t-IT’S a conspiracy of COURSE!!
Small clarification regarding the counting of canonical hours; ‘counting from sunrise’ means counting from sunrise of an equatorial day so that sext always occurs at the time when the sun would be in zenith on the day of the equinox. This practice continued until the establishment of daylight saving time.
DST was first proposed in an essay by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, but it was the Germans and Austrians that introduced the practice first in April 1916, most of Europe followed immediately, the Commonwealth outside the British Isles in 1917, while the US adopted DST in 1918.
Sparc
No! This is great though, we truly are proving how impossibly difficult this is.
The Sumerians divided the whole day (night and day) into 12. The Egyptians on the other hand introduced a nocturnal division of 12 based on the Sumerian tradition. Later they transported this division of twelve into the diurnal hour. Sexagesimal divisions of the hours comes after all that.
Read the cite you provided; it says this, but that might slip by if you don’t read it carefully… it comes down to the incredible confusion afforded us by the application of the term day to both the sunlight hours and the whole revolution of the globe.
Sparc
Part of Canada (Newfoundland?) is a half-hour ahead of Atlantic Time. That must be annoying.
And re: China, damn, wouldn’t that make for some really screwed up night/day times?
You’re right–I did accidently say “hexidecimal” when I meant “sexigesimal”. Late at night, too much sex, drugs, castanets, etc.
LOL! I wrote that cite. Thanks for the affirmation, I think…
Here’s a question we’re not addressing: when/how did the fertile-crescent-derived 24-hour system common to Europe get forced upon the rest of the world? How did the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians, the Aztecs, the Australian aborigines, the Hawaiians, the Inuit(!), etc., divvy up their days before we muscled in? (If they did at all.)