The Calendar: a Short History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
This is a blog about a conference “Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages” that took place at UCL on 3–5 July 2017. This conference presented the outcomes of the ERC-funded project “Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Standardization and Fixation”, on the history and evolution of calendars in late antique and medieval societies, together with contributions from international collaborators in the field. The blog includes references to full-length audio-recordings of most talks. Originally posted at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/calendars-ancient-medieval-project/2017/09/11/conference/
Calendar and cycles of time: Ancient knowledge and early medieval challenges
The requirements of time reckoning and demands on maintaining the mechanisms of constructing the cycles of Anno Domini and of the Easter celebrations required considerable attention from early medieval scholars. In light of the new discoveries, the extent of their innovation needs to be investigated against the considerable reassessment of the importance of calendar and astronomical observation for Near Eastern cultures. For the Babylonians, it was shown, had already been able to create cognitive mechanisms and procedures that were necessary to create a linear calendar out of the disjointed cycles they were able to observe by looking at the Moon and some other celestial bodies. The Greeks, however, passed on this problem as Aristarchus of Samos and Ptolemy, since they sought to create a geometrical, visual utopia. The cyclical character of time and the ways to construct a linear calendar were lost on them since they used many calendars in their own life that could be reconciled only within the Large Year of 19 years, the lunar cycle. It was Christianity, which, relying on the Old Testament narratives that borrowed from the traditions of Near Eastern, Babylonian astronomy, that began to struggle against visual pseudo-simplicity and sought to establish its calendar and in fact the dogma on that initial cyclical character that was common to both Babylonian sources and the Old Testament. Alexandria was in all cases the key transfer point and the place of synthesis. So Christianity's representation of time reached the Mediterranean in this strange roundabout way, by way of the school of Alexandria's interpretations. The key was the calendar that was centered on the events surrounding the Easter just because it required the adherents of the new religion to agree on the key event of the conjunction of the Solar and Lunar calendars and their restart (symbolized by the "Resurrection"). This originated in the fact that the key point of the calendar, the beginning of the cycle and the year, cannot be determined astronomical and so it is the matter of faith. And so unlike the Greeks, the Christians sought to reconstruct the Mesopotamian knowledge about the cycles of time, heavily represented in the Old Testament, as a principle of theology. Early Medieval scholars in this context can be understood better because they did struggle for maintaining the calendar cyclical and precision was subject to this principle. They also well understood that the beginning of the calendar is a consensual, goodwill act that requires a community's joint action and agreement.
Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, Ambedkar University Agra U.P (INDIA). Volume 4 Issue 11 pp.114-130, ISSN 2249-7315., 2015
Nations all over the world have sought different ways and methods to monitor, track and keep time in sequence with happenings around them. The Calendar serves as one of the greatest inventions of man to achieve this noble objective. A calendar therefore serves as a tool for man to keep records of events around them, to monitor changes in the environment, to keep themselves abreast with the dynamic weather conditions. As Nations have distinct characteristics, the evolution of Calendars all over the world was based on the movement of the astrological symbols such as the stars, moon and the sun in different regions of the world while having unique beliefs, cultures and traditional undertones of such nations at hand. This work sets to examine the development of Calendars in different nations of the world with an aim of understanding the factors that have shaped the development of calendars worldwide.
Six calendar systems in the European history from 18 th to 20 th Century
The following calendar systems, introduced in Europe from 18 th to 20 th century, which were in use for a shorter or longer period by a larger or smaller community, were reviewed and discussed: The French Revolutionary Calendar, the Theosebic calendar invented by Theophilos Kairis, the Revolutionary Calendar of the Soviet Union (or ’Bolshevik calendar’), the Fascist calendar in Italy and the calendar of the Metaxas dictatorship in Greece before World War II. Also the unique of them, which is still in use, the New Rectified Julian calendar of the Orthodox Church, adopted according to proposition of Milutin Milankovi ́c on the Congress of Orthodox Churches in 1923 in Constantinople, is presented and discussed. At the end, difficulties to introduce a new calendar are discussed as well.
Calendar Reform and World Chronology: Pierre De Lille’sTria Calendaria Parva(1529)
Isis, 2019
This essay explores the astronomical works of Pierre de Lille, a littleknown French participant in the debates on calendar reform during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517). It argues that astrological ideas coupled with eschatological beliefs motivated his astronomical propositions to reform the Julian calendar. De Lille conceived the calendar solar year as a unit of a great cosmic year spanning 7,153 years, the duration that he assigned to the now-obsolete theory of the motion of trepidation of the eighth sphere. Although his use of this astronomical model for astrological speculations about world chronology was not new, de Lille gave an original and bold reply to Pico della Mirandola's devastating critique of astrology. The astronomical model and its astrological implications were eventually contested at the court and in academia in France, but the alliance of chronology, astrology, and apocalypticism was to play a major role during the second half of the sixteenth century in Lutheran thought. M ost countries today still successfully use the Gregorian calendar adopted in 1582. Occasionally, different calendar problems come to the fore: we still remember how the year 2000 was predicted to produce major problems in computer networks because some machines abbreviated the representation of four-digit years to two digits and it was feared that the years 2000 and 1900 would not be distinguishable. The media were quick to see in the millennium bug an agent of destruction of the world as we knew it: we grew so dependent on our "globally networked digital technology" that "businesses, service providers, communications" could reach a "standstill." 1 Preventive measures were taken, and no such catastrophic event took place. In contrast, the rational treatment of calendar problems today is incompatible with the apocalyptic imagery still very much alive in our entertainment and media industry. At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, as this essay will argue, scientific calendar reform was fraught with questions of identifying the date of the Creation and of the End of the World. The Julian calendar needed reform on more grounds than the practical one of having an agricultural calendar in agreement with the cycle of the four seasons. Medieval and humanist Nicolae Virastau received his Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University in 2015. He is interested in and has published papers on the history of autobiography in early modern France and on the science of the stars before Copernicus.
Calendar Reform and World Chronology: Pierre de Lille’s Three Little Calendars (1529)
Isis , 2019
This essay explores the astronomical works of Pierre de Lille, a little-known French participant in the debates on calendar reform during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). It argues that astrological ideas coupled with eschatological beliefs motivated his astronomical propositions to reform the Julian calendar. De Lille conceived the calendar solar year as a unit of a great cosmic year spanning 7,153 years, the duration that he assigned to the now-obsolete theory of the motion of trepidation of the eighth sphere. Although his use of this astronomical model for astrological speculations about world chronology was not new, de Lille gave an original and bold reply to Pico della Mirandola’s devastating critique of astrology. The astronomical model and its astrological implications were eventually contested at the court and in academia in France, but the alliance of chronology, astrology, and apocalypticism was to play a major role during the second half of the sixteenth century in Lutheran thought.
The Attitude of Uniate Bishops towards Calendar Reforms in the Latter Half of the 18th Century
Roczniki Humanistyczne
The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 2. The provisions of the Union of Brest guaranteed the use of the Julian calendar in the Uniate Church. In the second half of the 18th century, as a result of the socio-political changes and the so-called reduction in holidays in the Latin Church the question of a reformed calendar was brought up among the hierarchs of the Uniate Church. Its elaboration and corresponding debates showed that the calendar was clearly considered to be an element of identification for all the faithful and an important factor creating a sense of separateness and identity in the multidenominational and multinational Polish Republic. The issue of reforming the calendar used by the Uniate Church was raised at the Great Sejm, but a new list of feasts was compiled by Uniate bishops during the congress of 17th September 1790 held in Warsaw. The hierarchy of the Uniate Church was also obliged to take a stance on t...
The Problem of Calendar Reform
The Gregorian reforms were implemented in the year AD 1582 to keep the Julian calendaric system in coincidence with the tropical year. However, these reforms were also not without approximations, so errors have continued to accumulate since then. Intercalation (to add a certain number of days after a fixed period) is employed to overcome such errors. In the Julian and Gregorian calendars it is accepted to increase a day in the month of February. In the Julian system every year divisible by 4 is considered as a leap year and the month of February in that year has 29 days instead of the usual 28 days. In the Gregorian system the rule is the same except that a centesimal year is considered to be a leap year only if it is divisible by 400. This communication aims at clarifying various confusions arising as a result of these intercalations. Also, there exist well qualified modifications (which suggest a rectification of the leap year rule itself) in the Gregorian system enabling it to remain serviceable for still longer periods. We have performed a verification of one such suggestion. We have also reviewed the calendaric system of Umar Khayyam for its potential as an alternative of the Gregorian system. However, its adoption is a matter for consideration by the IAU.
The Evolution of the Roman Calendar
This was my second published article, in a graduate student journal called Past Imperfect (Vol. 15, 2009) out of the University of Alberta. The published version can be found at: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pi/index.php/pi/article/view/6634 The Roman calendar was first developed as a lunar calendar, so it was difficult for the Romans to reconcile this with the natural solar year. In 45 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, creating a solar year of 365 days with leap years every four years. This article explains the process by which the Roman calendar evolved and argues that the reason February has 28 days is that Caesar did not want to interfere with religious festivals that occurred in February. Beginning as a lunar calendar, the Romans developed a lunisolar system that tried to reconcile lunar months with the solar year, with the unfortunate result that the calendar was often inaccurate by up to four months. Caesar fixed this by changing the lengths of most months, but made no change to