Harold Carr

music featuring harold

Story About Love by Marilyn Lerner (w/ Marilyn)
It's Up To You by h. carr (w/ Marilyn Lerner and Flavia Cervino-Wood)
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home :: environment :: 2004-07-18-outOfEgypt24hours.html

Sun, 18 Jul 2004

24 hours in a day seems arbitrary (unlike 365 days in a year). There is some evidence that it is based on the Egyptian belief that the Sun-god, Re, spent the ours of the night voyaging through th underworld in a boat. The underworld was said to be divided into twelve regions. The god must pass through each, passing one hour in each - the word for hour was written as a star.

The astronomer-priest selected twelve bright starts which rose in succession through the night, and, calling the interval between each an hour, charted the progress of the Sun-god through the underworld.

In practice it was not a single star but a 36 constellations (not ours) known as decans, since each one rose heliacally (i.e., the first pre-dawn rising) for ten days.

This whole system is made explicit in the painted star clocks which were prevalent from around 2200 BCE, in which twelve star-groups are charted for each ten-day period of the year.