"Natural" basis for the hour?

[Sapo]

Os, so that explains it for this side of the world. What about Ancient Asia or Pre-Columbian America? Were they base 12 too? Something else?

[Colophon]

@njtt

I believe the Romans divided the day (i.e., from sunrise to sunset) into 12 hours, but the night into four watches. Thus a summer hour was longer than a winter one (and a summer watch correspondingly shorter).

I’m struggling to see how this worked. Unless you knew when the sun was going to rise and set, how would you know how long to make each hour/“watch”?

And if you did know when the sun was going to set, you’d still have to use a constant-length measure of time to fix that and so work out how long each hour was going to be.

[naita]

@Colophon

I’m struggling to see how this worked. Unless you knew when the sun was going to rise and set, how would you know how long to make each hour/“watch”?

And if you did know when the sun was going to set, you’d still have to use a constant-length measure of time to fix that and so work out how long each hour was going to be.

This is merely an educated guess but:
[ul]
[li]They knew when the sun was going to rise and set.[/li][li]The constant-length measure of time was called “a day”.[/li][li]When your main time keeping device is a sun dial, setting this up isn’t that hard.[/li][/ul]