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ancient Egypt, antique, antique periods, astronomy, Babylon, Bronze, Décor, exterior, furniture, furniture history, gnomon, Greco-Roman, Greek, handcrafted decor, history, light, outdoor, Roman, shadow, style, sundial
As long as the sun has traveled across the sky, civilization has depended upon it to monitor the passing of time. Historians remain skeptical about the earliest sundials, but the first to appear in archaeological record are the Egyptian obelisks circa 3500 BCE. Babylonian astronomy utilized similar shadow clocks in 1500 BCE. In two different chapters, the Old Testament refers to the “dial of Ahaz,” a device for telling time via shadow-lengths.
Herodotus indicates that Greek culture borrowed the design idea from the Babylonians. Greek mathematician and astronomer Theodosius of Bithynia (circa 160-100 BCE) is credited with the creation of a sundial that would work at any point on the planet. Romans naturally inherited the idea from their Greek counterparts. Plautus, the Roman playwright, complained that his day had been chopped to pieces by the invention. Roman author Vitruvius catalogued all known types of sundials and their inventors in his 25 BCE De Architectura.
Islamic Caliphate cultures and the post-Renaissance Europeans continued to develop and expand upon Greco-Roman sundials. The Greek dials employed temporary, and unequal, hours with straight lines that would change with the seasons. Abu’l-Hasan Ibn al-Shatir used trigonometry to revolutionize the sundial in 1371. “Using a gnomon that is parallel to the Earth’s axis will produce sundials whose hour lines indicate equal hours on any day of the year;” thus, the polar-axis sundial was born. Western sundials began to adopt this model as early as 1446.
In Italy, astronomer Giovanni Padovani’s1570 treatise provided instructions for the creation of vertical and horizontal sundials. Constructio instrumenti ad horologia solaria by Giuseppe Biancani teaches readers how to manufacture the ideal sundial in 1620. Until the advent of the railroad systems of the 1830-40s, the United States depended upon the sundial for the official local time. MBW Furniture offers a varied collection of sundials.
Bronze Gnomon Roman Sundial Dionysus Pedestal Pedestal Sundial
Gnomon: the part of the sundial that casts the shadow (Greek word meaning “indicator”); usually, a thin rod or sharp edge
Style: the time-telling edge of the gnomon
Sundial: a device that utilizes light and shadow to determine time of day in relation to the Sun’s position in the sky
Horizontal/Vertical sundial: the sun casts a shadow from the sundial’s style to the surface marked with hour lines; the shadow-receiving plane is either aligned horizontally or vertically, but the devices work the same
Analemmatic sundial: since the Sun annually travels in a predictable pattern called the analemma, these devices trace an object’s shadow to measure hours, weeks, and months (often installed in public venues as décor, planetariums, and science museums)
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