In Assyria there is also a second and far more common form of specifying the years. Since a very early date (as far back as the fourteenth century) it was customary to name the year after some high official. The year, as such, is called limmu, “eponymic year.” Of course, they had continuous lists of these eponyms; and we have recovered several fragments. The lists for the years 893 to 666 are complete, and with fragments we can go still farther back. The kings frequently used this system, and private persons regularly used this eponym.
Some copies of the lists contain accounts of the changes of reigns, and give short statements of important internal and external events of the particular years. Thus an eclipse of the sun June 15, 763 B.C., mentioned therein can be astronomically fixed, and the dates arrived at thereby concur exactly with the accounts of the Ptolemaic canon. The chronological history of this epoch is therefore perfectly determined.[e]
THE BABYLONIAN DAY AND ITS DIVISION INTO HOURS
This being the Babylonian method of reckoning dates, it is interesting to note on what plan they subdivided the day. Investigations were made in this line by that indefatigable Irishman, Edward Hincks, from whose article “On the Assyrio-Babylonian Measures of Time,” in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, we quote.[a]
I begin with the day and its divisions.
Our knowledge on this subject is mainly derived from a tablet in the British Museum, marked K. 15. A paper of mine was read before the Royal Irish Academy in 1854, and was published in the twenty-third volume of the Transactions in which this tablet was discussed. As that paper contained some slight philological errors, I will here repeat the substance of it, correcting those errors.
I now translate the inscription on the Tablet as follows, omitting the customary benedictory formula. “On the sixth day of the month Nisan the day and the night are equal; six kazabs [kashbu] are the day; six kazabs [kashbu] are the night.” It is evident that this inscription records the observation of an equinox; and I will return to the consideration of it with that view. At present I will only remark that it points to a double division of the day, or Nycthemeron; viz., the first into the day properly so called, and the night; which were in this instance equal, though not generally so; the second into twelve equal kazabs [kashbu].
I proceed to the second division of the day into twelve kazabs [kashbu]. Each of these was equivalent, putting out of sight errors of observation, to two hours of mean solar time, such as we use in ordinary life. The word kazab [kashbu] is from a Hebrew root meaning “to fail,” which is applied to streams that run dry. This suggests the primary signification, “runnings out,” namely, of the water which had been poured into a vessel with a small hole in the bottom. The Babylonians measured time by clepsydræ, which, when they had been filled, would be emptied in two hours of mean time. Such clepsydræ would maintain a sufficiently accurate division of the day into twelve kazabs [kashbu] if the first were set to run at apparent noon, the second when the first had run out, and so on till the thirteenth, which would be set to run at the next apparent noon, whether the twelfth was just running out, or had already run out, or had still a little water in it.
The kazab [kashbu] is mentioned as an ordinary measure of time in more than one passage. The distance from the mainland to an island in the Persian Gulf is said to be a voyage of thirty kazabs [kashbu] (Botta, 41. 48), just as that from Cyprus to Syria is said to be one of seven days (Botta, 38. 41). Also, in Rawlinson, 42. 13, Sennacherib speaks of slaughtering his enemies for the space of a journey or march of two kazabs [kashbu]. This use of the word seems to me a positive proof that the clepsydræ was in use among the Assyrians and Babylonians generally, and was not confined to the astronomers.
There does not appear to me any reason to suppose that a division of the day from sunrise to sunset into twelve hours, varying in length according to the season of the year, and again of the night, from sunset to sunrise into twelve similar hours, was ever known to the Babylonians. Such a division was in use among the Egyptians, and was adopted from them by the Greeks, but the Babylonians and Assyrians knew nothing of it. I may here observe that some modern writers have committed a strange mistake in supposing the clepsydræ to have been invented so late as the third century before Christ and at Alexandria. These writers have confounded two totally different things; viz., the original invention of the clepsydræ marking mean solar time, which goes back to remote antiquity, and is almost certainly due to the Babylonians, and the adaptation of the clepsydræ to the seasonable (καιρικαὶ) hours of the Egyptians and Greeks, which was accomplished at the time and place which these writers mention. I have met with no subdivisions of the kazab [kashbu], and I much doubt whether the Babylonians had any means of marking such.[f]