First of all my sincere congratulations to Roger Bailey for his very fine Ottoman Sundial and for his clear and complete presentation in Power Point!
------------------- I try to say something about Italian, Italic, Ezanic, Byzantine hours : till now I apologize for my English and for the length of these notes. ------------------- Equal Hours For what I know the equal hours were never used in western classical antiquity by the common people and they were used only from astronomers and scholars in their calculations of the durations of periods of time (Ptolemy, etc.) The only system of hours used was that of the temporary or seasonal hours: 12 hours from dawn to sunset (period of light) and 12 hours from sunset to dawn (night). Also with this kind of division of the time, some people used to begin the day at sunset (for instance in Athens and in Islamic countries ), others at dawn (Babylonians), others at noon (some italic people as Umbri ), others finally at midnight ( Romans in civil law) . This didn't concern however different systems of hours but only different conventions and habits to establish the beginning of the day (also at that time it was important to fix the dates of the events). In Middle Ages, in Italy, prevailed the custom of Jewish and of some oriental people (with lunar or lunisolar calendars) to measure the duration of the day from sunset. ------------------- Italic hours With the invention of the tower's clock, that beats time in equal intervals, it became necessary (about in the first years of the XIV century) to use a division of the day in periods all of the same duration. In Italy, where appeared the first clocks that beat the hours with the sound of a bell, the use to begin the day at sunset was maintained and therefore it was adopted the system that we today call "italic hours" or "ancient Italian hours" or, best, "hours from sunset". The advantages were different: the use already consolidated was preserved; to regulate the clocks was simpler (observation of the Sun at sunset) and it didn't need the use of an auxiliary sundial; the hours marked by the bells immediately gave the indication of the remaining time to the end of the working day for the farmers in the countries and for the workers and the artisans in the towns. At the beginning the clocks beat 1 strike at hour 1, 2 strikes at 2 , etc. : 300 strikes in the whole day. After, to reduce the usury of the mechanisms and to increase the life of the clocks, the cycle of the sounds of the bells was divided in two cycles of 12, bringing so to 156 the total number of the strikes. At last in the XVI-XVII century were built clocks with a cycle of strikes from 1 to 6, repeated 4 times in the day (84 strikes at all) . This system of time was used in all Iatlian countries from about 1300 to about 1820. Out of Italy, in almost all Europe, it was slowly adopted the system to begin the day or at midnight or at noon: for this reason these systems in Italy were called of the "ore ultramontane" (literally hours beyond the mountains, that is beyond Alps) or "French hours" . In our language today there is a small difference between the adjective "Italic" and the adjective "Italian": Italic is used only to make reference to things of the ancient Italy (as the civil law, the customs, the dialects) or to the ancient inhabitants of the country. For this reason here no Italian dialist speaks of "Italian hours" and all use the expression "Italic hours." ------------------- Ezanic hours Till few months ago I had never heard of this kind of hours and the only source in which it appears is the translation in English from the Turkish of the of Atilla Bir's article in http://muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=942 in which it is used the tranlitteraton in English of the Turkish term "ezani saat" to indicate the hours from the sunset. In my opinion the "Ezanic hours" are exactly equal to those that we call "Italic" and they are not a different system of time, also if they use 2 cycles of 12 hour each. In the same way the hours marked by the clocks with 4 cycles of 6 hours are not a new system of time but only a different way of counting the hours; so also our modern hours don't have different names if our clocks use only a cycle of 24 hours or two cycles of 12 (AM, PM) If we call "ezanic" the hours from sunset used in Turkey why not to call "gurubic" the same type of hours used in Arabia (from the trnslitered Arabic "ghurub ashams" = sunset) ? ------------------- Byzantine hours Also the Byzantine hours, that we found only in the site http://www.diatheke.org/Athos/index.php?content1=Monastic%20life/time pointed out by Frank King, are new for me. (Pay attention because the site contains a virus!) The Byzantine empire fell in 1453 and during the 1000 years of its life the usual "temporary hour" were used . Even if some small communities of Orthodox religion, but that don't derive directly from the Byzantines, begin the day at sunset, I don't see the reason, also in this instance, to call their time system "Byzantine hours" or to create a new denomination. ------------------- Perhaps the best and simpler thing (comprehensible also for the not experts) would be to call this kind of hours "hours from sunset", remembering however that they are those that are called "Italic " or "Italian" in all modern and ancient gnomonic books, all over the world : -) Best wishes Gianni Ferrari
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