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Cultural Interchange Over a Water-Clock
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
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It once seemed almost self-evident that the extraordinary progress of Greek astronomy and mathematics in the Hellenistic age were, at least in part, the result of contact with Babylonian and Egyptian culture. But, whatever they may have owed to Babylonia in the exact sciences, there is now a growing consensus that even as early as Eudoxus the Greeks had advanced beyond the point where they might have profited from Egyptian help, and it is not easy to find a solid basis for the widespread Greek belief in the superior wisdom of the Egyptian hierarchy. Yet the preface to the famous Calendar for the Saite nome, P. Hibeh 27, provides circumstantial evidence that one Greek, at least, in the fourth or early third century B.C., found in Egypt an instrument for measuring the time at night which was new to him and which he may well have found impressive in its accuracy.
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page 61 note 1 Cf. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity2, p. 151.
page 61 note 2 Pack2 2011 (but the entry contains an error: there is no reason to think this a school text). The continuous numeration of fragments and columns is slightly misleading, as the calendar itself is written in a different hand from the introductory matter of frg. a; it is not absolutely certain that both come from a single work, though there seems no doubt that all the fragments concerned belong to the same roll.
page 61 note 3 ‘Ich möchte eher an den typischen Agyptischen “Weisen” denken, wie er häufig als Lehrer von griechischen Gelehrten in der Tradition begegnet.’ This perhapsneeds some qualification, since ‘typical Egyptian sages' have a long, and not altogether creditable, literary history, both in antiquity and in modern times: the alleged Überlieferungsgeschichte of the Book of Mormon is a familiar instance of this appeal to the authoritative wisdom of Egypt to commend esoteric doctrines. However, the convenience of an observational device and the accuracy of the information obtained with it are things which the interested reader might be expected to verify for himself; there is no point in investing either with a bogus Oriental glamour. The wise man of Sais surely represents a genuine Egyptian source.
page 62 note 1 The entry in L.S.J. obscures the generality of the term with a multitude of separate categories giving interpretations for particular contexts (though an omnium gatherum-sense of ‘index, mark’ (II. 5) is included). Certainly there is no evidence that before the Hellenistic period 
without further qualification could be used to refer specifically to the gnomon of a sundial.
page 62 note 2 For a similar experiment 
cf. Cleomedes 2. 1. 75 (p. 136 Ziegler); he concludes 
. Similarly Macrobius (Comm. in Somn. Scip. i. 21. 12 fF.) explains how the Egyptians used the water-clock to divide the zodiac into twelve equal parts.
page 62 note 3 Cf. Pieper, Zeitschr. f. äg. Sprache, lxvi (1931), 16 ff., Gwyn Griffiths on Plut, de Iside 12. Odd though such exegesis may seem at first sight, this is not an isolated case. Pieper describes another Egyptian interpre tation of (almost certainly) the same game in terms of a journey through the underworld; an astral interpretation of the game of 
is found in several Byzantine writers: see Lamer, s.v. lusoria tabula, R.E. xiii, col. 1904, where similar (perhaps related) Arabic interpretations of the game of nard are also mentioned. This was not a peculiarly Levantine mode of thought: for a tenth-century British attempt to find a scriptural sense in the popular Germanic game of hnefatafl see Murray, H. J. R., A History of Board Games other than Chess (1952), pp. 61 ff.Google Scholar
page 62 note 4 
was surely a water-clock, not a portable sundial; though the word can denote either, the latter is not much use to an astronomer. The other 
of his craft is presumably functional too: a straight palmrib with a V-shaped slot cut in the wider end was used by the Egyptians as a sighting instrument, and known as bay (en imy unut), ‘palm-rib (of the observer of hours)’. This is conveniently illustrated in Edwards, I. E. S., The Pyramids of Egypt2(1961), p. 259, fig. 54.Google Scholar
page 63 note 1 On Theophrastus' visit to Egypt, see Capelle, ‘Theophrast in Agypten’, W.S. lxix (1956), 173 ff.
page 63 note 2 The word itself occurs earlier, in Empedocles (fr. 100, 9), where, however, it means an instrument like a pipette. The sense of ‘water-clock’ sounds as if it originates in slang and the orators obviously prefer expressions with 
when they have to refer to it. The word 
is also conspicuous by its absence from an inscription of Iasos (Hicks, J.H.S. viii [1887], 103), dated to the early third century B.C., which gives a detailed specification for the construction of such a device. It should incidentally be noted that the Babylonians too used an instrument of this type; it is attested in certain problems of the kind which modern arithmetic books, with a distracting lack of verisimilitude, express in terms of wild extravagance with bath-water: see Thureau-Dangin, , Revue d'assyriologie, xxix (1932), 133 ff. But again, this seems fairly primitive. There is no reason to suppose that the Greeks owed their clepsydra to the Babylonians (unless that was what Herodotus meant by 
at 2. 109).Google Scholar
page 63 note 3 A water-clock of a sort is ascribed to Plato according to Aristocles 
ap. Ath. 174 c: 
It does not sound very sophisticated. I owe this reference to an anonymous referee.
page 63 note 4 See, for instance, Sloley, , J.E.A. xvii (1931), Plates xix, xx, xxi, Ancient Egypt (1924), p. 43; Borchardt, Altägyptische Zeitrechnung, Taf. I; Neugebauer and Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts iii (1969), Plate 2.Google Scholar
page 63 note 5 See Sloley, Ancient Egypt (1924), p. 45, Borchardt, op. cit., pp. 60 ff.
page 64 note 1 Cf. Edwards, , op. cit., pp. 257 f., Z. Zàba, L'Orientation astronomique darts l'ancienne Égypte et la pràcession de L'axe du monde (Prague, 1953), 56.Google Scholar