Evans, James (Author)
Marée, Marcel (Author)
Journal for the History of Astronomy
Volume: 39
Pages: 1--17
In the following pages, we present an addition to the corpus of sundials preserved from Greek Antiquity. This is a miniature, conical sundial made of ivory, discovered in Egypt by W. M. Flinders Petrie during his excavations at Tanis (San el-Hagar) in 1884.1 The dial had been burned and was found in pieces in the remains of a private house from late Ptolemaic times. In 1885 the sundial was donated by the Egypt Exploration Fund to the British Museum. Housed in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan under the inventory number EA 68475, it lay in seventeen fragments until the spring of 2005, when it was reassembled and studied in detail for the first time. It presents three features that make it unique, or at least highly unusual, among the extant corpus of ancient Greek sundials: (1) to our knowledge, it is the only such dial made of ivory;2 (2) it bears an inscription indicating that the lighting and shading of the undercut front face signalled the equinox; and (3) it was found among its owner's other effects in a private house, which allows us to view it in a particular cultural and archaeological setting.
...MoreDescription On an instrument discovered in an excavation by W. M. Flinders Petrie.
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