Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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The observation of chronological matters varies greatly in the ethnographical literature; I have gone through many books without result, and in other cases my gains have often been small. It is only in quite recent times that attention has been paid with any great profit to this side of primitive life. Among the English authors Frazer has drawn up a list of ethnological questions (printed in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18, 1889, pp. 431 ff., and also separately), paying due attention to time-reckoning, which has had a lasting and happy result, as can be seen especially in many papers in the JRAI of succeeding years.

Of the works of my predecessors only one has had any more elaborate aims—the ninth chapter of Ginzel’s handbook, which deals with the time-reckoning of the primitive peoples, divided up according to the different parts of the world. The significance of the time-reckoning of the primitive peoples for the history of chronology seems to have been only gradually grasped by the author in the course of his work, since it is not until after he has touched occasionally upon the question of primitive time-reckoning in the course of his account of the chronological systems of the Oriental peoples that he inserts the chapter in question between the latter and the chapters on the chronology of antiquity. Ginzel has in many respects a sound view of the nature of primitive time-reckoning, and makes many pertinent remarks, but on the whole his treatment, as is not seldom the case, is lacking in exactness and depth. I have gratefully made use of the material collected by him, going back, wherever possible, to the original sources. Of other previous works must be mentioned the essays of Andree and Frazer on the Pleiades,—the latter especially distinguished by its author’s usual extensive acquaintance with the sources and by its abundance of material—and the dissertation of Kötz upon the astronomical knowledge of the primitive peoples of Australia and the South Seas, an industrious work which however only touches superficially upon the problems here dealt with, and in regard to the lunisolar reckoning adopts the view of Waitz-Gerland:—“We can here discover nothing accurate, since these peoples have conceived of nothing accurately” (p. 22). I think however that we may fairly say that this is to estimate too meanly the possibility of our knowledge. Hubert’s paper, Étude sommaire de la représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie, is composed throughout in the spirit of the neo-scholastic school of Durkheim. The present work, on the other hand, is based upon facts and their interpretation.