How did people refer to clockwise movement before the invention of the clock?

zephyr@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 325 points –

Was there an alternative adjective to "clockwise" other than "the rotation you take around left hand"?

Also, how did all watch companies around the world agree on what the direction of "clockwise" is?

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Always has been.

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That made me curious, so I tried to find a pre-clock synonym in Indonesian. The best answer I have is by translating "Sunwise", which became "dr kiri ke kanan" or "from left to right."

Which make sense, if something is going clockwise around you, that's what you'd see. No idea if that was a real phrase or an artifact of machine translation, though.