RFC 4122 describes the formats of the various types of Universally Unique Identifiers, or UUIDs. A Version 1 UUID contains a time stamp “represented by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as a count of 100-nanosecond intervals since 00:00:00.00, 15 October 1582 (the date of Gregorian reform to the Christian calendar).” This article describes how to get a datetime.datetime object that represents this timestamp.

import datetime
import time
import uuid

# get offset in seconds between the UUID timestamp Epoch (1582-10-15) and
# the Epoch used on this computer
DTD_SECS_DELTA = (datetime.datetime(*time.gmtime(0)[0:3])-datetime.datetime(1582, 10, 15)).days * 86400

def uuid1_to_ts(u):
    """Return a datetime.datetime object that represents the timestamp portion of a uuid1.

    Parameters:
    u -- a type 1 uuid.UUID value

    Example usage:

    print uuid1_to_ts(uuid.uuid1())
    """
    secs_uuid1 = u.time / 1e7
    secs_epoch = secs_uuid1 - DTD_SECS_DELTA
    return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(secs_epoch)