Cistercian Clock
Four digits, one medieval glyph
How to read it
Point at a step, or tap it, to light up that part of the clock.
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The vertical staff is the backbone of the glyph.
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Top right: units. Top left: tens.
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Bottom right: hundreds. Bottom left: thousands.
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Read the four quadrants to recover HHMM, e.g. 1735 = 17:35.
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The story
Cistercian monks in 13th-century Europe devised a numeral system in which a single glyph encodes any number from 1 to 9999. Here the glyph encodes the time as HHMM in 24-hour format.
- Year
- 13th century
- Place
- Europe
- Creator
- Cistercian monks
Fun fact
The system fell out of use with the rise of Arabic numerals, surviving mostly in wine-gauging marks and historians' notebooks.
