If you were a small tribe in Sweden you don't have to worry about a small tribe in southern Italy because you would probably go a whole 200 years without even knowing that they exist. And it's time that helps you structure meetings, set events, start wars, end wars. And I was reading a Greek textbook, and in it there was a wonderful thing from a Greek philosopher who was saying, you know, time used to be fine until they put that damn sundial in the public square and now the days are getting faster. All people to a certain extent fear death, because death is an individual end of time. Almost every culture tries to create some way in which death is cheated.
People have a very hard time, despite the evidence, believing that they are really going to die.
There's reincarnation, transmigration of souls, a happy afterlife. You realize that time is for almost every culture a manifestation, a gift from that culture's god and if you make a beautiful clock, or a beautiful painting, or a beautiful manuscript, I think in some ways it's like thanking your god a little bit for having given you this gift of time. We don't know. Nevertheless, we've seen its traces, so someone like Descartes would say if it leaves traces it must exist. Up until the middle of the 19th century, every town in the world kept its own time and they usually did it by the sun.