Instruments · Sundial; perpetual calendar
Sundial, Greece, 400-600
- Maker / attribution
- Unrecorded in source
- Date
- 400-600
- Historical period
- Classical Antiquity (500 BCE – 500 CE)
- Country of origin
- Greece
- Place
- Byzantine Empire, Byzantine Empire
- Object type
- Sundial; perpetual calendar
- Holding institution
- Science Museum Group, London
- Accession / object no.
- 1983-1393
- Credit line
- Purchased
- Catalogue title (original)
- Byzantine sundial-calendar
Record summary
Held and catalogued by Science Museum Group, London (object number 1983-1393), this is a sundial; perpetual calendar, made in Byzantine Empire, Byzantine Empire, Greece, dated 400-600. The Atlas places it in the Classical Antiquity period (500 BCE – 500 CE) of its Instruments collection. The record is illustrated with 4 photographs.
Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.
Catalogue description
Science Museum Group description
This device, consisting of a sundial and geared mechanical calendar, is the second oldest known of its kind. The earliest known example is the Antikythera Mechanism. The owner of this device would have been able to use it as a sundial to tell the time in 16 locations across the ancient world and would have been able to predict the positions of the Sun and Moon in the zodiac and the lunar phases.
Historical context
Classical Antiquity (500 BCE – 500 CE)
Greek and Roman engineers refine the clepsydra; Ctesibius adds float regulation; the Antikythera mechanism models the heavens.
Greek astronomy produced the theory behind sundials and the astrolabe; the Antikythera mechanism (second or first century BCE) shows the sophistication of Hellenistic geared astronomical models.
Read the period in the timelineMore instruments from this periodEarlier: Ancient Civilizations
Atlas type guide
Sundials and solar time-finders
A sundial tells time from the position of a shadow cast by a gnomon or style. Because the sun's apparent motion depends on latitude, every fixed dial is laid out for a particular latitude, and portable dials either carry a latitude scale or are made for one region. Sundials show local apparent solar time, which drifts against mean (clock) time by up to about sixteen minutes over the year — the equation of time.
Portable dials were the pocket instruments of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Nuremberg and Augsburg workshops produced folding ivory diptych dials with inset compasses; English and French makers sold brass horizontal dials, ring dials and the Butterfield type; Japanese and Chinese makers had their own traditions of compass dials. After mechanical watches became reliable, dials remained in use for setting them, and nineteenth-century heliochronometers were built to correct directly for the equation of time.
What to look for
- The latitude engraved on the dial plate or a latitude arc on the gnomon — it shows where the dial was meant to be used.
- The type of hour lines: equal (equinoctial) hours, Italian or Babylonian hours counted from sunset or sunrise, or unequal temporal hours on early and Islamic instruments.
- An inset magnetic compass and whether a magnetic-declination mark is drawn on its card — a useful dating clue because declination changes over time.
- Maker's signatures and town marks: Nuremberg compass-makers (Kompassmacher) often struck a personal mark and the town's punch.
- Additional scales such as lunar volvelles, wind roses, perpetual calendars or lists of cities with their latitudes.
Dating clues
- Ivory diptych dials are characteristic of Nuremberg between about 1500 and 1700.
- Butterfield-type dials with a bird-shaped adjustable gnomon point to Paris workshops from the late seventeenth century onward.
- Equation-of-time tables engraved on the plate became common after the mid-seventeenth century, once pendulum clocks made the difference between solar and mean time obvious.
General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.
Read next:The history timeline
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