With the idea of the day in place, the Egyptians further classified time into arbitrary units that would come to have meaning and influence for centuries to come. As Whitrow explained, the ancient Egyptians were responsible for “[t]he [further] division of the daylight period into twelve parts….” (17). The time between sunrise and sunset was apportioned into ten segments that came to be known as hours; two additional hours, one for dawn and one for twilight, were added, for a total of 12 daytime hours (Whitrow 17). Night was similarly divided into 12 segments; together, day and night became a single cycle of 24 hours, a unit for marking the passage of time (Whitrow 17). As would also be true of later cultures, the ancient Egyptians relied heavily upon the changing positions of the stars to tell what the hour was at any given moment (Mainzer 3).

As their civilization advanced, so too did their concepts of time evolve; however, the Egyptians themselves did not take credit for devising a systematic, non-linear approach to organizing and understanding time (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 65). Instead, the Egyptians credited their gods and goddesses for introducing the idea of cyclical time divided into various units. In fact, in what Dunand and Zivie-Coche described as “a major hymn” to the goddess Neith, Egyptians chanted: “She made the moment,/she created the hours,/she made the years,/she created the months,/and she gave birth to the season of inundation, to winter, [and] to summer” (65). Viewed in this way, time was not malleable in the hands of the Egyptians themselves.

In the same way that time was introduced by the gods and goddesses, so too was it controlled by the deities (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 65). Despite the idea that life was a cycle that ended with death, the ancient Egyptians believed that death was merely a doorway into the next life, “the moment of a passage to another time” (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 65). Again, evidence from the archaeological record supports just such an argument, as ancient Egyptians were buried with the goods it was believed they would need to carry into the next lifetime (Budge 466). Historical time, that is, time on earth, was viewed “only as an application…on the human level” (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 66). Cosmic time, on the other hand, which was managed by the gods and goddesses, was the supreme expression of temporality (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 66).

Because the gods and goddesses were responsible for time, and because they alone determined the favor or difficulty that time would impose upon the Egyptian people, the ancient Egyptians’ physical structures and institutions were constructed in such a manner that their presence celebrated and affirmed the centrality of a time-consciousness in their culture (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 90). The physical structures of temples and pyramids were as carefully regimented and attentive to numeric division as time itself was (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 90). Furthermore, what occurred inside the temples through the performance of daily rituals also reaffirmed how time conscious the ancient Egyptians were (Dunand & Zivie-Coche 90). Daily rites and rituals were timed precisely to coincide with the specific environmental phenomena—such as dawn—that marked time for Egyptians. “The life of the temple,” wrote Dunand and Zivie-Coche, “began at dawn” (90), an observance that continues in the Muslim world to the present day.

In ancient Egypt, religious officiants were charged with performing tasks that signaled the literal and spiritual dawn of a new day. The first task was to prepare food made of the offerings laid on the altar by devoted Egyptians: “loaves, cakes, vegetables, fruits, red meat, and fowl….” (Dunant & Zivie-Coche 90). Once the offerings were acknowledged, the priest proceeded to break “the clay seal on the door of the holy of holies [and] chant the morning hymn, ‘Awake, great god, in peace! Awake, you are at peace’” (Dunant & Zivie-Coche 90). The breaking of the seal was followed by replacing the previous night’s candle and breaking still another seal, this one on the door of a cabinet hiding a deity statue. This act of ensuring that the god had been “[brought] to life after a night of sleep” confirmed that night had ended and a new day had begun (Dunant & Zivie-Coche 90). These were just the first in a series of ritualized actions that were performed to signal the passage of time, the transition from one day to the next, and the meaning it had for gods and mortals alike.

The ancient Egyptians are credited for introducing an astonishing number of ideas and practices that have remained central to human civilization. In his 1847 catalog of Egyptian culture, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Wilkinson credited Egyptians with inventing everything from agricultural irrigation, measurement systems, and codified writing to more abstract and idealistic ideas and institutions, including social castes and the legal and justice systems. Perhaps one of the most significant and lasting among the ancient Egyptians’ numerous contributions to human civilization, however, is the conceptualization of time which they developed and handed down to subsequent societies and generations. Although modern human beings are less inclined to see time as an attribute of life prescribed and overseen by the gods, and are more likely to view time as a universal feature of life that has existed, both immutable and unchanged, across all time and space, a review of the literature on the subject of the development of time as a concept indicates that the ancient Egyptians were largely responsible for introducing the concepts of time that we now hold so central to our own culture.

Egyptians were, in short, clock-watchers. Time was deeply important to the Egyptians, ensuring not only their physical survival, but providing the psychological, spiritual, and social rationale to substantiate their religious and cosmological beliefs. This ancient civilization, in many ways so different from our own, developed a cosmology of time that was derived from their religious beliefs and which served to reaffirm and honor those beliefs. While the ancient Egyptians credited their gods and goddesses with giving them the gift of knowledge and understanding about time, it was they who were responsible for identifying and defining the units of time according to which most of the world—its people and its institutions—operated today in the 21st century. Centuries after the decline of the ancient Egyptian culture and civilization, modern human beings continue to find value and meaning in the cyclical notion of time that was first presented by the Egyptians. Although our theories of time have become far more complex and sophisticated, and our understanding of just how profoundly time both influences and is influenced by a society’s subjective biological, cognitive, and psychosocial needs has deepened (TenHouten 22), time remains as important a human construct today as it was for the Egyptians millennia in the past.

Works Cited

Bochi, Patricia A. “Time in the Art of Ancient Egypt: From Ideological Concept to Visual Construct.” KronoScope 3.1 (2003): 51-82.

Budge, E.A. Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology. New York: Dover, 1989.

Dunand, Francoise, and Christiane Zivie-Coche. Gods and Men in Egypt: 3000 BCE to 395 CE. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Mainzer, Klaus. The Little Book of Time. Munich, Germany: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1999.

Meskell, Lynn. “Cycles of Life and Death: Narrative Homology and Archaeological Realities.” World Archaeology 31.3 (2000): 423-441.

TenHouten, Warren D. Time and Society. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005.

Whitrow, G.J. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wilkinson, John Gardner. The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. London: Oxford University, 1847.