If they knew the earth rotated, then they could assume that noon happened at different times at different locations. But did they have a way to prove this without being able to travel or communicate fast enough to observe the effects?
In: Mathematics
Not exactly. Time zones as we know them today are more or less an invention of the railroads. The ancients understood that noon could happen in different places at different times, according to longitude. But when it simply wasn’t possible to travel any faster than 20mph or so, it didn’t really matter. People just didn’t feel a need to keep time to that degree of precision, except in some very niche cases (like when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth).
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