I know that the seasons were indicators but how did they know precisely to the day how much a year was.
Edit: Copying from a response I made:
“Thanks for the response!
But I still have a doubt cause most of the reponses are to measure it in certain way and wait until the sun goes back to its initial position, and I get how measuring its easy by doing it over a long period of time but the difference between 2 days seems kind of difficult to notice, like when the sun got back to its position and people were like “yeah it looks about the same as how it started” and then they observed the next day and it looked exactly the same, how did they decide a specific day.
I guess my question is more about how they achieved such precission rather than the method”
In: Earth Science
Smart people have always been pretty smart. Have you seen the movie “Cast Away”?
Tom Hanks is stranded on an island with no real way to track the time/seasons. But he’s still able to track roughly what time of year it is, even on an island with no real seasons. He does this by tracking the position of the sun in a very smart way. His shelter cave has a small hole in it that allows a beam of sunlight in. At as close to the same time of day as he can manage, he marks on the wall where the sun beam falls. Throughout the year this spot will move on the wall as the sun is higher (summer) or lower (winter) in the sky. By marking the top and bottom positions year after year and counting the number of days between you get a pretty accurate count of the days in a year.
There are multiple different methods of performing this measure. You can have tall narrow object casting a shadow and mark the shadows tip at noon. You can use basic angle measurement device like an sextant to measure the angle of the sun at noon.
Different societies developed many different ways to perform this basic measure of the year throughout history.
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