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 As Time goes Buy

The story of time is really the story of humanity. It's a narrative that starts with day and night, and oscillates between order and chaos.

We've always lived in time. In fact, we've invented plenty of it to live by: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. But the tick-tock nature of our lives has also meant that periods when there was no universal agreed upon way to measure it have been tough on civilizations; especially when conflict breaks out over whose version is right.

Surprisingly, this is the very same thing that happens when we try to measure the passage of time. In fact, there's a long history of different eras having different answers to this question; some looking at nature as a way to measure how fast time's moving, others using calendars and clocks and even the sun. And while all these methods have proven remarkably accurate over time, they've all had their problems. There's always been some group of people who felt that their method was correct — and that other groups didn't have the right answer.

The Chinese had a calendar of 12 lunar months which extended for about 360 days, but this had the disadvantage of being entirely dependent on the weather and annual harvest. The Incas, who lived much further south in South America, used a more accurate solar calendar based on 365 days. However, it fell behind every century by about ten days – an inconvenience that was easy to spot with their short monthly names and long yearly ones that they created by adding strings of syllables such as pacha or allpa.

In fact, the Incas were so concerned over how to keep their calendar in step with time, they built the most impressive architecture of the era and engineered an intricate hydraulic network to help them predict floods through observation. The latter was achieved by building large canals to control water flow and divert it from flooding settlements. They also managed to shift the entire country of Peru onto a new timezone that corresponded to their religious beliefs – which itself divided the country into four zones based on the altitude.

The Incas were so concerned over how to keep their calendar in step with time, they built the most impressive architecture of the era and engineered an intricate hydraulic network.

The Incas may also have been responsible for one of the more unusual methods of measuring time in history – where each moment was given its own name depending on what a person did during it. This made it very hard to understand how much time had passed, or have a sense of its passage.

For example, in the Inca language kinu:ma was the time between dawn and sunrise, kunu:tu was the period between sunrise and noon, pucuy was an hour from noon to sunset, yana:na was from sunset until midnight and aceru:wa was an hour after midnight. This meant that each day became a series of unique descriptors that lost all sense of order or structure. The same way that a sentence like "he ate rice with fish" doesn't really tell you anything about what happened during any given meal.

To make matters worse, the Incas didn't even call the physical passage of time "time" – they chose to use the term khipu:ki. And this was done with good reason, because it had a very different meaning to people outside their civilization.

Khipu:ki literally means a string of knots – and it refers to how complex the knotted string of traditional knots was that made up their calendar. However, in itself this doesn't make much sense when we think about time passing , so it wasn't until the Spanish invaders arrived that khipu:ki effectively became khipu:ma and became part of an attempt to explain it to them.

The Spanish had their own methods of telling time, but they too struggled with the complex Inca knots. So, when the Spanish started to use Christian names to describe dates and days, they named them after saints. And when they tried to tie the indigenous knots into their own system, they found it impossible without a guide.

In fact, the missionaries discovered that tying or untying the knots actually represented an entirely different calendar system known as a quipu:qipu. Each knot was tied in a specific way to represent either a position in the calendar or a number up to ten. But when they tried to decipher the secrets of quipu:qipu, they discovered that the knots represented local knowledge and very little that had anything to do with the passage of time.

While this meant that explaining khipu:ki became very difficult, it also meant that there was no universal sense of how time passed during an Inca day. In fact, it seems likely that their days were based on the needs of daily life and not on any sort of structured passage of time. For example, some historians suggest that the Incas developed and enhanced the calendar to ensure that every day of their year was evenly split between rain, snow and sunshine in order to reduce risks of starvation in the highlands. However, this would result in less water naturally making it to lower altitudes, meaning fewer farmers were able to survive.

The Incas may have also been experimenting with a solar clock based on agriculture. Although the evidence is unclear, it appears that they tried using sunlight reflected by mirrors to mark the passage of time. The problem was that since they did not have sophisticated clocks or calendars at this time, they would have had difficulty how exactly how much time had passed and how accurate their clocks were.

In their efforts to make the Inca calendar more efficient, they didn't just convert the khipu:ki into Spanish names – they also made it very different in how it worked. They discovered that the knots could be untied by having people count up to ten. If they got to nine, they'd move on to number 10 and go back again. But when they got to ten it would mean that every following year was going to be exactly the same again: an indication of how difficult it was for them to understand khipu:ki and its meaning in everyday life.

The Incas may have tried using sunlight reflected by mirrors to mark the passage of time.

Conclusion

The khipu:ki represents one of the most complex and puzzling measures of time in history. And it is a testament to how different time can be from place to place that even today we struggle with understanding the very basics of the Inca calendar. However, we can still gain a lot from the Inca's efforts by learning to appreciate that our own sense of time is very different from theirs.

As well as trying to understand what it means to have six years make two and two years make three, in more recent times we've also attempted to dramatically improve our sense of how long things take. One way that has been adopted is by using standardized units for measurement such as minutes, seconds and milliseconds.