This two-day conference cosponsored by the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will bring together well-known scholars from a range of disciplines to debate an important topic that has yet to be the focus of a major conference: the social history of small-scale timekeeping.

Concepts of time have become a hot topic lately in the study of antiquity. Scholars recognize that the physical and linguistic tools that individuals and societies use to describe the passage of time have a powerful effect on the ways in which they shape their own personal and community narratives. For the most part, however, scholarly attention has been focused on large temporal structures: for example, the ways in which philosophers and mathematicians conceived of time in the abstract; how historians, like Thucydides or Diodoros Siculus, mark time in a chronological narrative; and especially, how political entities managed their calendars.

Surprisingly, in the midst of this enthusiasm for examining how ancient people structured time spans of a year or more, there has been very little discussion of how they structured time within a day. Yet, we have over 500 examples of sundials and water clocks from the Greek and Roman worlds and countless references to hours or other sub-units of the day within ancient literary and epigraphic sources. We know also of intra-day time-measuring practices from Pharaonic Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, which pre-date the Greek and Roman examples by a substantial margin. Scholars have only recently begun to interrogate all of this material and to challenge the traditional belief that, in the western world, humans did not begin to organize their activities ‘by the clock’ until the Medieval period.

The conference will advance these studies by encouraging in-depth and interdisciplinary discussion among experts in the literature, history, material culture, and papyrology of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. It should appeal to diverse sections of the UChicago community, drawing participants from the departments of Classics, History of Science, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.