There were no watches in ancient times, so how did they divide their time and time every day?

There were no watches in ancient times, and our ancestors used wisdom to create ingenious and unique timing methods and tools.

1. Japan and Britain

The earliest timing tools were the sun, the moon and the stars, but the sun, the moon and the stars sounded deep, but their shortcomings were obvious. Smart people find watching the sun a bit dazzling and confusing. They find a shadow in the sun and do the opposite, making a stone pillar to judge time according to the sun.

2. Leaking pot

If the sun is used to calculate the time, the error will be great. After accumulating a lot of life experience, there has been a leak. Carved flowerpots appeared in China, probably in Shang Dynasty and early Western Han Dynasty. Copper flowerpots and chopsticks-sized wooden water jugs unearthed from Liu's tomb. The principle is to insert a wooden ruler in the pot, weigh it in the wooden ruler, drip water from the spout, and the wooden ruler falls down, so that you can see the time on the scale.

3. Engraving system

When the "centimeter system" was used in the Han Dynasty, the time was determined by measuring the length of the sun projection with a watch by using the method of "sun azimuth timing". Osmanthus fragrans table consists of two parts: one part is a strip or cylinder of the shadow standing on the flat ground, which is called a table; The other is stereotype, which measures the length of the table shadow in the north-south direction. Because the sun can be measured by its length, there is a saying that "an inch of time is worth an inch of gold". Every sun position measured by returning to the table will gradually have a fixed name, which is the origin of hours. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the "sun azimuth timing" officially evolved into "twelve o'clock timing". The combination of "100%" and "12 o'clock" made the timing system in ancient China more perfect.

In ancient times, these tools for calculating time included the wisdom of ancestors.