Time

I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
STEVEN WRIGHT

Phantom Time Hypothesis

According to the Phantom Time Hypothesis theory, the period between 614 ad and 911 ad didn’t exist; the history normally attributed to that time is either a misinterpretation or a deliberate falsification of the evidence.  If this were true, Charlemagne (reigned 768-814) never existed and the year 2012 is actually 1715 ad.

The idea was created in 1990 by a man called Heribert Illig and has since been developed by other German historians as well as conspiracy theorists.
  • Arguments in favour of the theory are as follows: The apparent stagnation in the development of architecture, ceramics and thought as well as the lack of substantial documentary evidence – this is why the first part of this period is called the ‘Dark Ages’  - suggests this period simply didn’t exist.
  • There is very little archaeological evidence which can be reliably dated to this period; our account is based on a quite limited number of written sources (which could be faked or just wrong).
  • The Pope introduced the new Gregorian calendar in 1582 to replace the Julian one, when it was 10 days out of sync. If the error had been building up since the introduction of the Julian calendar in 45 ad, it ought to have been 13 days out – so the intervening period must have been overstated by 300 years. Mainstream historians have a simple explanation, though: the purpose of the change was to bring the calendar into line with the Council of Nicaea in 325 ad, not with 45 ad – which accounts for the discrepancy.
  • Architect, astronomer, educator, philo­logist, folklorist, lawmaker, statesman - the range of achievements credited to Charlemagne is so great that it implies he is a mythical figure.
If Phantom Time Hypothesis holds up, who created the fake, and why? Perhaps the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III wanted to be on the throne at the time of the Millennium, 1000 ad, so he got chroniclers across Europe to invent and document an extra 300 years.

Illig’s followers face many difficulties of course: the theory has yet to explain how it would fit into the history of the world outside Europe, or into astronomical records, or into the tree-ring data. More inter-disciplinary research needed, they say.
Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.WILL ROGERS (1879-1935)
An octodesexcentenary is 592 years long.
The Incas' measurement of time was based on how long it took to boil a potato.

Decimal Time

During the French Revolution they tried out decimal time. The day was divided into 10 decimal hours consisting of 100 decimal minutes which each lasted 100 decimal seconds. Despite being the official time, nobody used it and so it was abandoned after 18 months (as measured in non-revolutionary Gregorian time).
Time is not a road – it is a room.JOHN FOWLES (1926-2005)

Time and Tide

The word ‘time’ is the most commonly used noun in English. It is deceptively versatile.  It can be an abstract idea – the time that physicists talk about. But it can also be a discrete moment (‘I smile every time the cat dances’) or the exact hour of the day (‘what is the time?’).

Other languages use three words to describe these three senses. In French they correspond to temps, fois and heure. In German, they are zeit, mal and Ur. Even in Old English, we used two different words: tid, meaning a chunk of time (like ‘eventide’) and tima, which was their equivalent of ‘hour’. Gradually these distinct senses have coalesced into one, multipurpose word.

Where did the word come from originally? The oldest root we have is dā – a Proto-Indo European prefix meaning ‘to cut or divide.’ That makes sense – in all its various guises, time is a measure of the space between things. The Greeks went even further than we did in stretching this meaning. In Ancient Greek, dā mo became the distance between different types of people, as in demos or ‘ordinary citizens’ and even between the Gods and humans: dai-mon meant ‘divider’ and gave us our words daimon or demon.

Is there any other word small enough to describe something as mundane as a railway timetable and yet suggestive enough to encompass the deepest mysteries of the universe? Only time will tell . . .

Telling Time in the Ancient World

Ancient Greeks used a device called a clepsydra (water-thief) as a timer for places and times when sundials couldn’t be used. This also consisted of a jar with a hole in the bottom, but worked in the opposite way to the bowl timers. As long as the jar was kept topped up, the water flowed out the bottom at a steady rate and could be used to measure time. Clepsydrae were used in courts to define how long speeches could last.