You'll find the ancient interpretation that the new day starts at sunset still in religions. Sabbath starts on Friday evening, Easter and Christmas day start on the eve of the day before. Possibly the Eids of Islam too, but I'm unsure.

Ethiopia is one of the ancient Christian countries, the second of officially convert and the Ethiopian Ortodox Church still seems prominent. I assume that's the reason why.

"An hour was defined as one twelfth of the daytime"

That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer!

> That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer!

Mechanical clocks in Japan were designed to handle those situations:

> Adapting the European clock designs to the needs of Japanese traditional timekeeping presented a challenge to Japanese clockmakers. Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal time units: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night-time units from sunset to sunrise.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours

Much less of an issue without clocks.

Look where the sun is, remember where it is at sunrise/-set (much easier if you're outside every day) and then mentally divide the sky into segments and just ballpark it.

"Look where the sun is"

Well, maybe that was another problem with Scotland... ;-)

No wonder they built a few walls and retreated south....

That’s standard traditional Hebrew time still today.

Possibly simpler to explain that it is just an artifact of using sun dials for timekeeping. Sun dials technically only can tell time accurately during daylight and base-12 is an easy division of a dial (circle).