I
The origins of the concept of time are lost in the mists
of prehistory but from our knowledge of surviving
primitive races it would seem highly probable that the
lives of our remote ancestors were far less consciously
dominated by time than are ours. For example, al-
though the children of Australian aborigines are of
similar mental capacity to white children, they have
great difficulty in telling the time by the clock. They
can read off the position of the hands on the face of
a clock as a memory exercise but they are quite unable
to relate it to the time of the day. There is a cultural
gap between their conception of time and ours which
they find difficult to cross. Nevertheless, all primitive
peoples have some idea of time and some method of
reckoning, usually based on astronomical observations.
The Australian aborigine will fix the time for a pro-
posed action by placing a stone in the fork of a tree,
or some such place, so that the sun will strike it at
the agreed time.
Primitive man's sense of rhythm was a vital factor
in his intuition of time. Before he had any explicit idea
of time, he seems to have been aware of temporal
associations dividing time into intervals like bars in
music. The principal transitions in nature were thought
to occur suddenly, and similarly man's journey through
life was visualized as a sequence of distinct stages—
later epitomized in Shakespeare's “seven ages of man.”
Even in so culturally advanced a civilization as the
ancient Chinese different intervals of time were re-
garded as separate discrete units, so that time was in
effect discontinuous. Just as space was decomposed into
regions, so time was split up into areas, seasons, and
epochs. In other words, time was “boxed.” Even in
late medieval Europe the development of the mechan-
ical clock did not spring from a desire to register the
passage of time but rather from the monastic demand
for accurate determination of the hours when the vari-
ous religious offices and prayers should be said.
It was a long step from the inhomogeneity of magical
time as generally imagined in antiquity and the Middle
Ages with its specific holy days and lucky and unlucky
secular days to the modern scientific conception of
homogeneous linear time. Indeed, man was aware of
different times long before he formulated the idea of
time itself. This distinction is particularly well illus-
trated by the Maya priests of pre-Columbian central
America, who, of all ancient peoples, were probably
the most obsessed with the idea of time. Whereas in
European antiquity the days of the week were regarded
as being under the influence of the principal heavenly
bodies, e.g., Saturn-day, Sun-day, Moon-day, etc., for
the Mayas each day was itself divine. Every monument
and every altar was erected to mark the passage of
time. The Mayas pictured the divisions of time as
burdens carried on the backs of a hierarchy of divine
bearers who personified the respective numbers by
which the different periods—days, months, years, dec
ades, etc.—were distinguished. There were momentary
pauses at the end of each prescribed period, for exam-
ple, at the end of a day, when one god with his burden
(in this case representing the next day) replaced an-
other god with his. A remarkably precise astronomical
calendar was developed embodying correction for-
mulae that were even more accurate than our present
leap year correction which was introduced about a
thousand years later by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.
Our correction is too long by 0.03 days in a century,
whereas the corresponding Maya correction was 0.02
days too short. Despite this astonishing achievement
the Mayas never seem to have grasped the idea of time
as the journey of one bearer and his load. Instead, each
god's burden came to signify the particular omen of
the division of time in question—one year the burden
might be drought, another a good harvest and so on.
