A Celtic Clock

Around 3/4ths of my ancestry is Gaelic (aka Celtic). The Gaels were very interesting. They sprang from a seafaring culture that was once the lingua franca from the baltic to the black sea, around 2200 years ago, and probably quite a while before that. When the greeks were building monuments, the Gaels were actually pretty much everywhere else in the Med and the Baltic seas and all the way up in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Roughly speaking. If you spoke Gaelic, you could trade at the ports around Europe.

They had a lot of traditions. They believed if you killed a man and cut off his head, you stole his power. Displaying this head handing from the eaves of your thatched hut was traditional, as well as intimidating. They didn't care for armor, though they liked painting themselves blue with woad, a local plant dye, before running into battle screaming and fiecely waving swords, maces, axes, whatever. Round shields were common enough, but mostly they went light weight and attacked. Their wars are well studied, those with any details.

But that's not what's interesting to me. What's interesting is that the Gaels, like many mature cultures, kept celestial time. The Mayans did this. So did the Chinese and the Inca. You stick around long enough you figure out the moons aren't perfect for the year. That the stars are more accurate, and that the shadows cast by the sun leaves a very accurate calendar system. They figured this out, having occupied the British isles for millenia prior. At some point they built stone henge, which is a famous bit of astronomical clock on Salisbury Hill, I guess they call it. Never been. Turns out the Gaels, by tradition, gave the day 6 hours, evenly divided, running from sun-up to sunset. Sunset was the end of the Day, by their calendar and the start of the next, rather than midnight, which is the modern tradition. Its all arbitrary, you see.

If you wanted to build a Celtic clock, you'd have to adjust by date for the sunrise and sunset for those hours, since it changes daily, which would actually be a pretty interesting programming problem in Java, wouldn't it? You'd have to also know your latitude and longitude specifically. In modern methods, you'd want GPS coordinates for the right time, since the Gaels did it based on where they were rather than time zones or other modern contrivances.

I only mention this because a friend of mine, we'll call him That Guy(tm), pointed out that had the Romans opted to co-exist with the Gaels instead of losing their shirts in wars with them leaving them wide open for invasion by the Vandals and Visigoths a couple centuries later, we might have their clocks and time keeping methods today. They were more accurate than the Romans, after all. And a thousand years earlier too. Apply gears and a calendar system to a mechanical escapement watch for those 6 hour days that accurately predict sunrise and sunset, and everybody still speaking either Latin or Gaelic, since there would have been no lingual drift to give us French, Spanish, Portuguese, separate from Latin or Italian. Just ponder that.

If the lingua Franca was actually Latin and Gaelic at the ports since the sailors would likely have continued on sailing. And perhaps mixed more with the Basques, who also have their own language, boat building techniques heavily borrowed from for the Renaissance Exploration vessels, and under a stable Rome, wouldn't have been pushed into the Manifest Destiny crap that killed so many American indians. Picture the Americas with 50 million living indians, and intact Incan and Aztec empires, perhaps having given up the wholesale slaughter of their populations or obsession with easily disproven cult religions. Rome might not have fallen to the Christians.

A stable Rome 2000 years ago that wasn't wasted on fighting the Gaels would be one disinterested in the latest cult from Jerusalem, a place that spawns them almost monthly, and remains embroiled in constant warfare because they've got no water supply. I would like you to imagine a Middle East where the cults are so thick on the ground that some shepards claiming immortality are laughed at, and drunks claiming the mountain came to them? Yeah, laughed at. Without devoted apostles, both horrific Middle Eastern Exports of note would have died stillborn.

I have to wonder what the Romans would have done, had they recovered themselves and learned to get along with their neighbors through trade rather than bloody conquest. I wonder, what would the shape of the world today look like? Would the computer have been invented 800 years ago, since there was no Dark Age? Would the world population be larger or smaller? Would China have been more active because it wasn't being intimidated by Manifest Destiny jerkwads out of Spain and Portugal?

Would the wars of India's provinces still be ongoing without the British empire to kill everyone who wanted to fight? Would SE Asia still be monarchies? Australia would likely be just as empty, since that tragedy happened 80,000 years ago, thanks to climate change and the practice of burning brush to drive game by the Aboriginies. They didn't know any better, and managed to destroy the continent in the process.

The Libs love to postulate that if we'd just been more understanding, the world would be populated and happy and multicultural wonderland. It just ain't so. Some cultures are a real PITA. We killed off the Aztecs, who really had it coming doing human sacrifices, one of those things the Romans wouldn't stand for. I suspect they would have eventually talked down the Gaels into competing in sports instead of head hunting, given time.

Imagine if the Gaels were in the Olympics. That would have been a good move, actually. Get the Franks and Saxons in on that too. Maybe the Egyptians and Nubians as well. Get the various Steppe Peoples in on that. And the Swedes and Finns, the old Norse from before the Vikings. If Rome hadn't been so crazy, the world would be a different place. Possibly more peaceful. And your clock would have a six hour day and a six hour night. Just imagine.