Tigranes IV (d. 36 c. e.) King of Armenia Tigranes reigned c. 6-8; he was probably a grandson of HEROD THE GREAT through Alexander and his wife Glaphyra, daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia. One of Archelaus’s wives was probably connected to the Armenian royal line, thus qualifying Tigranes, perhaps obliquely, for the succession. He was clearly not the first choice of Emperor Augustus (that had been Gaius Caesar’s Mede, Ariobarzanus), but he had died, as had his
Tigris One of the major rivers of the ancient world and, with its companion to the west, the Euphrates, an important element in the development of Mesopotamia. The Tigris, which formed Mesopotamia’s eastern border, flowed out of ARMENIA into Assyria and then down through Babylonia until it reached the Persian Gulf. Like the Euphrates, with which it converges as it nears the Gulf, the Tigris was a political dividing line in the Parthi an and Persian empires. Numerous cities were situated either on or near it, including Nisibis, Hatra, Apamea and one of the Parthian capitals, Ctesiphon. Roman campaigns into
Mesopotamia always took the Tigris into strategic account. Thus, when trajan invaded Parthia in 115 C. E., he passed down the river, captured Ctesiphon and continued marc h-ing until he reached the Gulf. Such use of the Tigris was meant to define it as the easternmost region of the Roman Empire; such occupation was shortlived, as Hadrian soon reestablished the traditional frontier. The Tigris was part of the economy of the East, as caravans stopped along its banks and shipping, to a small degree, could pass nort h-w a rdfor some distance into Babylonia.
Time The Roman day was divided into 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. By the middle of the second century B. C.E., the Romans understood that the length of daylight varied throughout the year and also depended upon latitude. Midnight was counted as the sixth hour of the night, and noon the sixth hour of the day, with the first hour calculated at the start of sunrise and the 12th hour as the hour before sunset. As hours were not of a fixed length, varying with seasons, the key measurements were midnight and noon. The term ante meridiem designated the time “before the middle of the day,” and post meridiem designated the time “after the middle of the day.”
One of the chief methods used for telling time was the sundial, the solarium (pl., solaria), which first appeared in Rome around 263 b. c.e. as part of booty brought to Rome from Sicily during the Punic War. For nearly a century, the Romans remained ignorant of the fact that the sundials needed to be calibrated for a specific latitude and seasonal adjustments. Therefore, their sundial was telling Sicilian time rather than Roman. The solarium also had the disadvantage of needing sunlight to tell the time, so it was useless at night and on stormy days. The most famous of the solaria of Rome was the Solar Clock of Augustus, erected in 9 b. c.e. by Emperor Augustus in the Campus Martius. The solarium was designed with the help of the mathematician Manilius. Unfortunately, it was notoriously inaccurate, as was noted by PLINY THE ELDER.
In 159 B. C.E., the Romans began importing water clocks, clepsydrae, which told time by a regulated dripping of water. Variations of the clepsydra included very elaborate mechanisms that could tell time for an entire 24-hour period. The water clock was not especially accurate, but it did have the advantage of telling time at night. All Roman horologia, or clocks, sought to divide the day into equal parts, meaning that even if accurate, they ran counter to the accepted division of the day into two times, night and day, with unequal hours depending upon the time of year or the latitude.
See also calendar.
World History
