By using an Egyptian gnomon, we charted the changes in the sun’s position around a fixed point throughout the day. We later created a shadow clock–a device that appears on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. It has a merkhet, or a vertical bar, for casting a shadow onto a base. It is ruled with 4 tick marks, presumably to correspond to hours. By aligning the clock with the east until it is perfectly level via a plumb-bob the shadow cast should correspond with a tick mark. In my experiment it did not, but that was because i interpreted the length of a palm to be my actual palm, which caused my merkhet to be very short.
Advertisement
