# Time and Its Measure: Historical and Social Implications
## 2 The Social Implications of the Measurement of Time  
The first to organize time according to a non-decimal scale was probably the Babylonians, for whom the division of the year was twelve months, due to the twelve phases of the moon, and it was therefore logical to divide day and night into twelve phases of light and twelve of darkness, the twenty-four hours that we know. It is always assumed that the Babylonians decided to divide the hours into sixty minutes and the minutes into sixty seconds because sixty was the largest number that the Babylonians had given a name (the sexagesimal system). The same weekly organization was inherited by the Babylonians and provided a temporal sequence of activities that ended with the last day dedicated to rest. Even today, in the organization of surveillance shifts, the sentiries are required to pay attention for 2 h and rest for 4 h in order to ensure the highest degree of vigilance. This organization dates back to [PERSON], who spread the use of the hourglass (Figure 2) among the legionaries in order to respect the guards during the long solar hours characterizing (especially in summer) the lands of the Diano valley. The time taken by the water to escape from the underlying hole was the reference time unit. The term hourglass comes from the Greek \(\kappa\lambda\varepsilon\
u\phi\delta\rho\alpha\) (klepsydra), which literally means \"steal-water\", since the first models used water for religious and philosophical questions, giving a better idea of the passage of time. Even the weekly division into quantitatively equal periods is not historically determined by astronomical phenomena but rather associated with events of social aggregation for the exchange of goods. For example, the Roman week was marked by the \"_mundiane_\" that occurred every eighth day, during which farmers entered the city to sell their products. Similarly, the duration of a week was ten days for the Incas; four days for many tribes in West Africa; five days in Central America [6], the East Indian Archipelago and old Assyria (now Soviet Russia); etc. The cyclical period chosen by ancient populations to divide the lunar month was therefore often connected to economic aspects of daily life. The shorter intervals of three, four and five days are those that guaranteed communities, without large supplies of food or with other needs, a sufficient frequency of supply from neighboring communities. By contrast, the much less common six-, eight- and ten-day longer cycles apparently arose by doubling the previous period whenever a large market was desired for a large area's products. Those temporal systems that are common among small, closely intertwined groups participating in the same social rhythm obviously become less and less adequate as society expands and widens its field of interaction. In the Western world, the calendar based on the repetition of seven-day periods spread with Rome throughout its empire as early as the first century BC; this time it was its astrological value that decreed its success and made it a universally recognized institution. In 1793, the revolutionary fury of the Enlightenment attempted to overturn this secular organization by introducing the use of the decimal system for the measurement of time. The Council of the French Republic imposed (from 1793 to 1805) a new calendar (Figure 3) with months of thirty days (from Nivose to Frimaire) and weeks of ten days, each of which was divided into two phases of ten hours each, with each hour divided into a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds. Immediately rejected by popular acclaim, after only two years (1802), by the Cisalpine Republic, both for the suppression of the weekly rest period (many Sundays are lost with  
Figure 3: The calendar imposed by the Enlightenment revolution and based on the use of the decimal system for measuring time. Figure 2: Ancient Roman water clock. Note the small holes, indicating the days, and the writings, indicating the months, engraved on the edge.