OK, How in the world do they keep time ?

[Gman]

As I'm watching the DJG marathon here in CA it just occured to me... how in the world did they keep time in those days ? I mean all this "meet me back here at 6" or " I'll see you in two hours ".

Maybe the royals had some sort of time piece and or there was some central system and time was marked by some bell.

I could understand a vague reference to after lunch or sunrise or sunset. But what is their system and how do you/they explain it in the drama ?

Curious, Gman

[lifan unlogged]

Not sure.. but in ancient China, they have a guy in the village whose job it is to go around and hit a gong every couple of hours to let everyone know what time it is. The hours as we know it, is not the same.. each marking of time is a longer period of time. Maybe they have a similar system in Korea. I doubt very much they can synchronize their watches down to the minutes in the manner of Mission Impossible back in those days so 'Meet me here in 30 minutes' would have been phrased differently. I imagine that time would have been a bit more vague. My 2cents.

[djanggum]

I once heard that some people told time by looking at the position of the sun....

[sdjumble]

Waterclock, sundial... lots of people carried a portable sundial. How they did it on cloudy days, not sure. They could also tell by watching the sky and the celestial bodied, and do it more accurately by using special tools.

There were also people who would beat drums at a regular interval.
They may have also used their own biological clocks.
And lastly, they must have been more accustomed to waiting. Waiting 1~2 hours must have been a normal thing, like going to the promised place 5~10 minutes earlier/later is no big deal for us.
But the system is the same as ours in that a day consisted of 24 hours. Actually, 12 'hours' and then they divided each 'hour' by half to get 24 hours.