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
I don’t know if anyone would be able to pull up a document of ancient Greeks discussing time zones.
But they all knew that noon determined your latitude and that longitude depending on WHEN noon happened but they had no accurate clocks to measure the difference as they moved distances.
I guess you are thinking that time zones can only be proven with an experiment but they did not have any technology to measure time effectively.
They tried around 300 BC to key it to a lunar eclipse, to measure the distances, but the clocks accuracy wouldn’t last long enough.
But the concept of time zones (the sun is at different points in the sky when you are at different points on the globe) is a trivial one that comes from the precepts that the earth is a globe and rotates.
So I would say they implicitly knew of them. But it didn’t matter that much? no instantaneous communication would be possible. And even fast movement and communication wouldn’t be affected by different time zones in a noticeable way.
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