When the sun was down how did societies that used sun dials know how much time has passed?
In: 7
You’ve probably already seen an hourglass, that’s one method.
There’s also the water clock, essentially a bucket with a small hole and marks on the inside that indicate how much time has passed based on how much water has flowed out.
Candle clocks were another method. Wax burns at a predicable speed. This means that you can make candles in a standardized size and get a decent idea of how much time has passed by measuring the candle. Candle holders with the hours already marked used to be available.
If you know enough astronomy it’s possible to know the time by looking at the stars.
To be clear, most people didn’t have hour glasses or astronomy or whatever. They just didn’t know.
Perhaps they’d hang around in the twilight/just after dark or eat or whatever in the evening (especially in the winter when the nights were long). Then they’d sleep.
Artificial light, from say candles, was expensive. It took a lot of labour to prepare candles or collect fire wood.
Many people in pre industrial times had ~~diurnal~~ biphasic sleep cycles – meaning they’d wake up in the middle of the night to do… stuff. Then go back to sleep. Then it’d be morning.
Kinda how like you (hopefully) sleep late evening to the morning without really thinking about time, even if you wake up a bit in the night.
EDIT: I just re-read the question and realised I clearly wasn’t paying attention on my first reading – you were asking about when the sun is hidden by a somewhat more solid obstacle than mere clouds, so my answer doesn’t actually answer your question at all, but I figure some people might find it vaguely amusing anyway :-/
There are lots of *other* means of telling the time that don’t rely on the sun, and others will likely mention those – there might be an issue with the question being “societies that used sundials” indicating that they didn’t use other methods, though 😛
Anyway, in the spirit of my general desire to find an answer nobody else comes up with, how about using [a sunstone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)) (not [sunstone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone)!)
Certain kinds of crystals ([Iceland Spar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_spar) being a contender) can react to light in such a way that you can see which direction the sun is even when overcast. Combining this with a sundial* would allow you to tell the time in moderately cloudy conditions 🙂
* or knowing which way’s north plus a bit of geometry 😛
So, in the good old days, nightlife kinda didn’t exist. people went to sleep pretty early.
Farming life meant knowing how many hours passed kinda didn’t matter. as long as you are up before noon, you are essentially golden.
For those in more “academic” environments, candles are generally used. in Asia, time was also measured using sticks of incense. as they burn at a relatively similar rate. Hourglass was also employed, most notably on ships and churches. But this would require the technology of Glass making to be unlocked first.
There are several answers here, but all of them sort of ignore the point. Until modern times, what time it was didn’t matter in the slightest. People would get up when the sun came up, eat breakfast and then go to work. They ate lunch around midday. When the sun went down, time to go home, eat dinner, and then go to bed. Whether that was 6 AM you got up or 8 AM that you got up, no one knew or cared. Whether it was 11:30 or 2:30 that you ate lunch, no one knew or cared. Whether you went to sleep at 8 PM or 10 PM no one knew or cared.
Nothing started at a set time or finished at a set time. Church started when the church bell rang. Even when schools came around, they started when the school bell rang. If the school bell rang one day at 7:30 AM and another at 8:30 AM, no one knew or cared.
The first thing that time actually started mattering was trains. Trains would start to run on set schedules so they needed reliable ways then of knowing when it was time for the 10 AM train to leave. By that point, clocks were a common thing.
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