Origins of Timekeeping

 

Pre-history

 

Our pre-historic ancestors needed a way to predict when natural occurrences would be repeated.  The occurrences differed according to the geographical area and the climate.  But in all cases, primitive people relied on natural markers:

 

The Sun,

The Moon,

The Stars,

The Planets.

 

Hunting and gathering communities needed to mark time for:

 

· The annual caribou crossing for hunting,

· When berries and fruits would return to bushes and trees to augment their diet,

· When animals, such as bears, came out of hibernation and could be hunted,

When to prepare and get ready for winter.

 

Later, as pastoral, agricultural and religious societies developed, there was a need to know:

 

· When offspring from their flock would be born,

· When the rainy season would return,

· When annual flood of the Nile would come again,

· When to sow and when to harvest,

When to celebrate religious and other important events.

 

Calendars

 

Early people noticed the four phases of the moon and at first tried to keep track of time by creating a lunar calendar.  However, lunation was not helpful in predicting annual events.  Ultimately, lunar cycles were kept for months, and solar cycles were kept for years resulting in a lunisolar calendar which we continue to use today.

 

Ancient Chinese, Babylonians, Greeks, Jews and Arabs used a lunar calendar. The Islamic calendar has a lunar year of about 354 days. This results in the Islamic religious festivals migrating through all the seasons of the year.

 

Solar calendars do not divide evenly and adjustments had to be made which is why every four years in February we add another day and call it a leap year.

 

The Egyptian calendar evolved so that the solar year was closer to 365 1/4 days, but they didn’t account for the fractional day.  As the years passed, the months fell out of sync with the seasons, so that the summer months eventually fell during winter. In addition to the civic calendar, the Egyptians also had a religious calendar that was based on the

29 1/2  day lunar cycle and was more closely linked with agricultural cycles and the movements of the stars.

 

The ancient Mayas (2000 BCE - 1500 CE) invented a calendar with remarkable accuracy and complexity. They too had a religious calendar.  Their calendars later became portions of the great Aztec calendar stones.

 

The Roman calendar started the New Year in March in keeping with the Spring Equinox.  By the time Julius Caesar came to power, the calendar was out of sync with the seasons.  In 46 BCE, advised by the astronomer Sosigenes, Caesar introduced sweeping reforms to bring the calendar back in step with the seasons.  This calendar became known as the Julian calendar and is still used by the Eastern Orthodox churches for holiday calculations.

 

By the 16^th century, it became obvious that further adjustments were needed. Under Pope Gregory XIII, mathematician and astronomer Father Clavius reformed the Julian calendar.  Thursday, Oct. 4th 1582 was to be the last day of the Julian calendar. The next day would become Friday, Oct. 15, making 11 days disappear. This calendar became known as the Gregorian calendar.  Vatican librarian Aloysius Giglio, made every fourth year a leap year, unless it is a century year like 1700 or 1800. Century years can be leap years only when they are divisible by 400 (e.g., 1600 and 2000). Following this rule eliminates three leap years in four centuries, making the calendar sufficiently accurate.

 

Catholic countries accepted the Gregorian calendar.  But Europe's Protestant countries ignored the papal bull - an announcement from the Pope to the Catholic world - and continued with the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar was finally adopted in 1700 for Germany and the Netherlands; Great Britain and its colonies in 1752; Russia after the Russian revolution 1918 and Turkey switched from the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1926.

 

Solstices

 

The sun’s rays are crucial for life on earth and ancient civilizations paid great attention to the movements of the sun as it traversed across the sky.  They realized that, when viewed from a fixed point, the place on the horizon where the sun comes up and goes down changes with the seasons.  During winter, the sun does not rise as high in the sky and this results in shorter days.  During summer, the sun rises higher, giving us with longer days.  There are two periods in the year when the sun seems to not move – June 21^st and  December 21^st.  This is called a “solstice”.  The word “solstice” comes from the Latin “sol” meaning sun and “stice” meaning “standing still”.

 

Summer Solstice

The summer solstice on June 21^st was a cause for celebration because it was the midpoint between the spring equinox* and autumn equinox.  Ceremonies usually occurred at places of power, like a sacred grove or stone circles such as Stonehenge in England which was erected 4,000 years ago. At noontime in the northern hemisphere, the sun appears high in the sky during summertime. This is the time of the year when the sun reaches its maximum elevation with the greatest number of daylight hours.

* during the equinox, the length of daylight and darkness are almost the same for a few days

Winter Solstice

The winter solstice, on December  21^st,  marked the shortest day of the year and was a time when the sun was at its lowest in the sky. Fearing that sun would disappear and leave them in permanent darkness and extreme cold, our ancestors developed rituals such as lighting bonfires to encourage the sun to regain its strength.  Many ancient religions were based on sun worship.

 

Recognizing the winter solstice

 

Humanists, wanting to have something to celebrate but not being able to accept religious rituals, have turned to celebrating a natural occurrence.  It is very common now in Humanist circles to have Solstice parties in December in lieu of Christian festivities.

 

Calendar months

 

The word “month” is derived from the word “moon”.  The names given to the twelve months in a year is a mixture of accumulative numbers, names of gods and names of rulers. The year is divided into 12 months, based on the approximate 29.5 days of each lunar cycle. Ancient people worked out that twelve lunar cycles constitute a year before returning to first season.  Because lunar cycles don’t divide evenly, adjustment to the days in the months were made and leap years added. In the original Roman calendar, March marked the beginning of the New Year.  Thus March was the first month and February was the twelfth:

 

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The egotistical rulers, Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus wanted to name months after themselves. When Caesar reformed the Roman calendar in 46 BCE, he chose the fifth month “Quintilis” to be named “Julius” because that was the month of his birth.

In 8 BCE, the Emperor Augustus changed the sixth month “Sextilis” to August because that month was a lucky month for him.

 

The Gregorian calendar sanctioned the common practice of having the first day of January as the beginning of a New Year rather than March as in Roman times.  Although making January the first month put the numbered months out of sequence, the names of these numbered months never changed:

 

30 days hath September,
April, June and November;
all the rest have 31
excepting February alone,
which has 28 days clear
and 29 in each Leap Year.

Days of the week

The seven day week began with the Babylonians.  Cultures, such as the Jews and Greeks incorporated the Babylonian week into their calendars but they numbered the days from one to seven.  The Babylonians assigned a different planet to each day.  According to the Babylonians the first day was that of Shamash, the sun, so the week started with Sunday.

 

The seven-day week was chosen because its length approximates one moon phase in the lunar cycle: 29.53 ÷ 4 = 7.3825 or 4 x 7 = 28. The Babylonians chose the order of the days according to their understanding of a planet’s relationship with the Earth.  The Greeks named some of their gods after planets and the Romans translated the names of these gods into Latin.  These names were used for the days of the week: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. The seven-day week became part of the Roman calendar in 321 CE.

Teutons, whose culture spread over much of Europe, originated from Scandinavia, about 2000 BCE.  Their language was Norse based and when these tribes conquered England in the 5th century, CE, they laid their own lexicon over that of the Romans’ so that some of the Norse gods supplanted the Roman gods. Around 200 CE, when the Teutons on the northern borders of the Empire traded with the Romans, they copied the seven day week. The sun and moon were not gods to the Teutons, merely recognizable natural bodies. This ancient Teuton culture did not include the study of stars and planets and so they had no equivalent for the god Saturn. They simply borrowed that name. 

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