And the person whom has been woken up is asked of who wakes him up from sleep at dawn? And he says it is the crowing of the cock. The crowing of cocks at dawn signifies the time to wake up from sleep and prepare ourselves for the works ahead for the day.
At noon too, this bird still crows to tell us what the time is. Cocks do not make the mistakes of not knowing when to crow to indicate the certain time. They are birds destined to keep the time for mankind. Cocks crow very early in the morning to get the farmers to head for their farms to work and crow in the evening to indicate that they should start heading home because the day is going to get dusky very soon.
Whichever way we look at it, the Cocks are master time keepers of the world. Just like the cocks, the Sun was equally observed in those days to know what the time was saying by our forefathers. When the Sun is shining, its apparent position in the sky moves during a day, reflecting the rotation of the Earth. Shadows cast by stationary objects move correspondingly, so their positions can be used to indicate the time of day.
A sundial shows the time by displaying the position of a shadow on a (usually) flat surface, which has the markings that correspond to the hours. Sundials can be horizontal, vertical, or in other orientations. Sundials were widely used in the ancient times. With the knowledge of latitude, a well constructed sundial can measure local solar time with reasonable accuracy, within a minute or two.
Sundials are continued to be used to monitor the performance of clocks until the modern era. However, practical limitations, such as that sundials work only when the sun shines, and never during the night, encouraged the use of other techniques for measuring and displaying time.
© Olalekan Oduntan 2015.
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