What things you discovered on your own, that is actually already known and named for a long time? For example, you observe a phenomenon, you write it down, but didn’t look it up further for lack of words. Years later, you chance upon the exact same thing on Wikipedia.
It’s like saying Newton’s gravity of Law is wrong because Einstein disproved it lol. It’s just an ancient finding that’s still true for the most part 2000+ years later.
Got you. But it’s implied that they have already figured out irregular daily movement of the sun. if they could predict sun and the moon they would have known about the discrepancy of the sunrise and sunset throughout the year. as you have mentioned it yourself, equation of time simply explains this occurrence, but to observe said occurrence doesn’t require you to compute it with advanced knowledge.
If i had to guess Chinese had to use other unit measurements like candle and what not, it would not be seconds but whatever unit measurement of time they came out with would be accurate for that time period.