This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
There's a real treat for you here this week for #HistFicThursdays! I'm once again teaming up with The Coffee Pot Book Club for author Finlay McQuade 's blog tour! Today, I'm sharing an excerpt from his exciting book, Life and Death in Ephesus ! First of all, let's meet the book... For over a thousand years, Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, was a thriving city. It was the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Wonders of the World, and a destination for religious pilgrimage long before the advent of Christianity. In the first century CE, St. John and St. Paul introduced Christianity to Ephesus, where it survived its turbulent beginnings and, in the fifth century CE, hosted the God-defining Council of Ephesus. Life and Death in Ephesus is a collection of stories about major events in the history of Ephesus. Characters appearing in these stories include Herostratus, first to commit a “herostratic crime”; Alexander, the warrior king;...