Turning to time, for almost all of humanity's history, the primary time standards were celestial: the Earth's rotation, the Moon's orbit, and the Earth's orbit. These three effects combine to make the day, the month, and the year.
The Sun's apparent motion relative to the Earth's equator sometimes speeds up and sometimes slows down, an effect called the "equation of time". It has two sources, the tilt of the Earth's spin axis relative to its orbit axis, and the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, and it was known at least as far back as Claudius Ptolemy, nearly 2000 years ago.
Division of the day into 24 hours is also very old, going back to ancient Egypt at least 3500 years old. In the European Middle Ages, the hour was divided into 60 of the "pars minuta prima" (first small part: the minute) and that division was divided into 60 of the "pars minuta secunda" (second small part: the second). There was no "pars minuta tertia" (third small part) because it would have been too small to perceive, and the second itself is close to the lower limit of our time perception.
Thus, 1 mean solar day = 24 hours = 1440 minutes = 86400 seconds
Over the nineteenth century, the second became adopted as the reference unit of time, with everything else being defined in seconds.
By the mid twentieth century, it was evident that the Earth's rotation was not as good a timekeeper as the planets' orbital motions, so in 1956, the second was defined in terms of the year, or more precisely, some specific year: 1900.
Over all this time, astronomical time measurements had been ahead of laboratory ones in accuracy, but in the 1960's, the lab people finally caught up, and in 1967, the second was defined in terms of the frequency of the hyperfine transition of cesium-133. It may eventually be redefined with the frequency of some visible-light transition, but that is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Over all this time, however, time measurements were based on universal standards and never on specific artifacts.
