A Genealogy of Temporal Construal: Primordial Time: Cycles, Seasons, and the Dawn of Temporal Awareness

The earliest construals of temporality emerge not as abstracted measures but as relationally embedded practices: time is first known in its cyclical and embodied forms, inseparable from ecological rhythms, ritual observances, and the symbolic frameworks through which early societies apprehended the world. To construe time at this stage is to inhabit a field of recurrent possibility, wherein the patterns of day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the shifting of seasons delineate the contours of action and expectation. Temporality here is inherently co-constituted: human activity, cosmological observation, and symbolic inscription collectively stabilise a recurrent horizon of potentialities.

Agricultural calendars exemplify this relational temporality. The timing of sowing and harvest, the observation of lunar phases, and the prediction of flooding cycles instantiate a practical temporality that is simultaneously social, ecological, and symbolic. These calendars do not merely measure time; they actively modulate what is possible within a given season, embedding constraints and affordances that structure human and non-human co-becoming.

Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmologies further articulate temporal fields through symbolic inscription. The cyclical journeys of celestial bodies are mapped onto mythic narratives, wherein gods enact recurring patterns of creation, destruction, and renewal. These narratives function as construals of temporal potential, translating observable phenomena into fields of relational possibility that shape ritual, social order, and cosmological expectation. Time is thus both embodied and mythically narrated, its continuity maintained through ritual enactment as much as through observational record.

Crucially, these primordial temporal frameworks resist abstraction into linearity. The horizon of possibility is cyclical, and knowledge of the future is contingent upon relational alignment with recurring patterns rather than derivation from immutable laws. Temporality is performative: it emerges through the repeated actualisation of cycles, through the iterative interplay of observation, ritual, and embodied action. In this sense, the “dawn” of temporal awareness is less a conceptual discovery than a relational calibration of potentialities across human, cosmological, and symbolic domains.

Modulatory voices: While the dominant pattern is cyclical, it is important to note variation and tension. Agricultural innovations introduce anticipatory elements; the codification of calendars begins to abstract cycles into discrete units, foreshadowing the eventual linearisation of time. Mesopotamian king lists and Egyptian dynastic records inscribe temporal sequence, signalling the emergent awareness of history and sequence alongside ritual recurrence. These early divergences suggest that even primordial time contains the seeds of temporal differentiation, a relational foreshadowing of linear and ethical construals to come.