Sundial, the earliest type of timekeeping device, which indicates the time of day

by the position of the shadow of some object exposed to the sun’s rays. As the
day progresses, the sun moves across the sky, causing the shadow of the object
to move and indicating the passage of time.

sundial
Animation of a sundial. Before clocks were invented, people generally relied on the passage of
the sun through the sky to tell time. One of the most important early devices for telling time was
the sundial. Click on the arrow in the illustration to see an animation of how the sun's position in
the sky was used to mark the daylight hours.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The rst device for indicating the time of day was probably the gnomon, dating
from about 3500 BCE. It consisted of a vertical stick or pillar, and the length of the
shadow it cast gave an indication of the time of day. By the 8th century BCE
more-precise devices were in use. The earliest known sundial still preserved is an
Egyptian shadow clock of green schist dating at least from this period. The
shadow clock consists of a straight base with a raised crosspiece at one end. The
base, on which is inscribed a scale of six time divisions, is placed in an east-west
direction with the crosspiece at the east end in the morning and at the west end
in the afternoon. The shadow of the crosspiece on this base indicates the time.
Clocks of this kind were still in use in modern times in parts of Egypt.
Another early device was the hemispherical sundial, or hemicycle, attributed to
the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos about 280 BCE. Made of stone or
wood, the instrument consisted of a cubical block into which a hemispherical
opening was cut. To this block a pointer or style was xed with one end at the
centre of the hemispherical space. The path traveled by the tip of the pointer’s
shadow during the day was, approximately, a circular arc. The length and
position of the arc varied according to the seasons, so an appropriate number of
arcs was inscribed on the internal surface of the hemisphere. Each arc was
divided into 12 equal divisions, and each day, reckoned from sunrise to sunset,
therefore had 12 equal intervals, or “hours.” Because the length of the day varied
according to the season, these hours likewise varied in length from season to
season and even from day to day and were consequently known as seasonal
hours. Aristarchus’s sundial was widely used for many centuries and, according
to the Arab astronomer al-Battānī (c. 858–929 CE), was still in use in Muslim
countries during the 10th century. The Babylonian astronomer Berosus
( ourished c. 290 BCE) invented a variant of this sundial by cutting away the part
of the spherical surface south of the circular arc traced by the shadow tip on the
longest day of the year.

The Greeks, with their geometrical prowess, developed and constructed sundials
of considerable complexity. For instance, the Tower of the Winds in Athens,
octagonal in shape and dating from about 100 BCE, contains eight planar
sundials facing various cardinal points of the compass. Moreover, numerous
ancient Greek sundials feature conical surfaces cut into stone blocks in which the
axis of the cone (which contains the tip of the gnomon) is parallel to the polar
axis of Earth. In general, it appears that the Greeks constructed instruments with
either vertical, horizontal, or inclined dials, indicating time in seasonal hours.

As with the Greeks, the Romans’ sundials employed seasonal hours. In 290 BCE
the rst sundial, which had been captured from the Samnites, was set up in
Rome; the rst sundial actually designed for the city was not built until almost
164 BCE. In his great work De architectura, the Roman architect and engineer
Vitruvius ( ourished 1st century BCE) named many types of sundials, some of
which were portable.

The medieval Muslims were especially interested in sundials, for these provided
means for determining the proper times for prayer. Indeed, most Muslim
sundials contain lines indicating these times, and on a few they are the only lines
at all. Although the Muslims learned the basic principles of designing sundials
from the Greeks, they increased the variety of designs available through the use
of trigonometry. For example, they invented the now-ubiquitous sundial with the
gnomon parallel to the polar axis of Earth. At the beginning of the 13th century
CE, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Marrakushi wrote on the construction of hour lines on
cylindrical, conical, and other types of sundials and is credited with introducing
equal hours, at least for astronomical purposes.

With the advent of mechanical clocks in the early 14th century, sundials with
equal hours gradually came into general use in Europe, and until the 19th
century sundials were still used to reset mechanical clocks.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn, Managing
Editor, Reference Content.

gnomon

Gnomon, device originally meant as an instrument for calculating the

time. In its most simple form it seems to have been a rod placed
vertically on a plane surface, later upon the surface of a hemisphere.…