With humans appearing to be the only animals on the planet with an understanding of the ageing process and their own mortality, it should come as no surprise that the measurement of time has been important to us ever since we got past the grunting stage.
Most early religions were matriarchal and lunar-orientated, so the lunar cycle was taken as the prime measure of the passing of time as reflected by the two oldest time records, both of which were found in Africa. The twenty-thousand-year-old Ishango bone, unearthed in the Congo in 1960, seems to mark off the days of six lunar months. Claudia Zaslavsky, author of the intriguing book Africa Counts (1973), believes it to have been a woman’s counter for her menstrual cycle. With age estimates ranging from thirty-five thousand to forty-four thousand years, the much older Lebombo Bone, discovered in the mountains between South Africa and Swaziland, is inscribed with twenty-nine notches, the number of days in a lunar month.
Ancient calendars evolved from the need to know the right days for religious observance and the payment of debts or rents. As ancient Rome ran on the old-style lunar calendar, the city’s priests would stand vigil to announce their sighting of the new moon, so the first religious calendars took their name from the Latin calare, to call or shout out.
The first day of each Roman month was thus known as the calends, which gave rise to ‘calendar’: first a term for an accounts book. It was much the same in ancient Persia, where a ledger was called a devan, with the debtor sitting on a specially shaped divan to receive payments. Medieval England also ran on lunar calendars, which were hand-painted by monks who highlighted important festivals and rent-owing days in red lead, hence ‘red-letter days’.
BY THE RIVERS OF…
The ancient city of Babylon was an international trading centre long before the rise of Greco-Roman culture. The city-state worked on the old lunar calendar of twelve months, alternating between twenty-nine and thirty days to allow for the fact that there are in fact 29.53 days to the lunar cycle. The old Babylonian year of 348 days (instead of the more accurate lunar year of 354.36 days) presented them with complex problems when they later shifted to the lunar-solar calendar, with the solar year comprising 365.24 days.
But we owe it to the Babylonians for there being seven days in a week and for the structure of hours and minutes. Astrology was of prime importance to the Babylonians, who knew of only seven significant celestial bodies – the Moon, the Sun, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus – and invented the seven-day week to allocate a day of veneration to each. The Babylonians and the Egyptians seem to have come up with the zodiac between them, after noting how the constellations seemed to move about the sky with the seasons, but lost in the mists of time are the identities of those who decided to join up the dots to give us the star signs we still recognize today.
THE ZODIAC
For those who do believe in astrology there are a couple of problems worth taking into account, the first of which is the omitted thirteenth sign of the zodiac.
The Babylonians were either unaware of the thirteenth house or chose to studiously ignore it, as it made a nonsense of their numerical obsessions. Either way, other more accurate astrologers since the second century BC have taken into account the sign of Ophiuchus, or the serpent bearer, which rises to solar prominence between 29 November and 19 December to create an astrological sign to sit between Scorpio (more properly Scorpius), and Sagittarius.
Until Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) reformed the calendar from a ten-month year to a twelve-month one, the Roman zodiac comprised only eleven signs: those born under the influence of Libra have Caesar to thank for their sign, which had to be hurriedly invented and shoe-horned into the zodiac to sit within the new structure of the year. On top of that, none of the signs today are where they were for the Romans, the Greeks or the Babylonians.
Thanks to over two thousand years of the gravitational pull inflicted on the earth by the moon and the sun, the earth’s position relative to the constellations has changed, meaning the signs of the zodiac have been gradually shunted back to now stand about a month out of sync with modern astrological charts. Capricorn, for example, now rises between 20 January and 16 February, while astrological charts still mark it from 22 December to 19 January. Capricorns are therefore actually Aquarians, and so forth back through the charts.
In 1930 the Sunday Express became the world’s first newspaper to run an astrological column, with both the editor, John Gordon, and the star-caster, Richard Naylor, technically risking their lives.
On 24 August, Gordon published Naylor’s chart predicting the life of the newly born Princess Margaret (1930–2002), a crime of treason for which both could have been legally executed. Whether or not you believe that lumps of rock millions of miles out in space can orchestrate your life is a matter of personal choice but, since the late fourteenth century, it has been deemed treason in the UK to predict by astrology the life of the monarch or any of his or her immediate family – just in case the ‘science’ were accurate.
If you could foretell the day of the monarch’s death you could stand ready for a coup at precisely the right time and, in 1930, the death penalty was still very much in place for treason. The casting of stars for members of the British Royal Family is still technically illegal but, in practice, not considered worth the ridicule of prosecution.
The old Roman ten-month year began in March, as seen in the names of September, October, November and December, so named from the Latin for seven, eight, nine and ten. When the additional months of January and February were added in the Julian calendar, these months slipped forward in the year to stand, as they do today, as the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months of the year. But the year for the Romans still turned over in March, with February the twelfth and final month of the year.
Instituted in 46 BC and named after Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar was a better system, but still flawed. Caesar’s general Mark Antony (83–30 BC) immediately suggested that the seventh month be named in honour of Julius, who promptly stole a day from February to increase his eponymous month from thirty days to thirty-one. Later, Augustus Caesar (63 BC – AD 14) felt slighted that August, the month named after him, only had thirty days, so he too stole another from February to put him on par with Julius and leave poor old February two days short.
The main problem with the Julian calendar was that it generated too many leap years. The earth takes 365 days, five hours, forty- eight minutes and forty-five seconds to orbit the sun, so the Julian calendar added an extra day to February every four years. But this was an over-compensation which, come the sixteenth century, left the calendar twenty-four days out of sync with the equinoxes and solstices
THE GREGORIAN CALENDAR
The usurping Gregorian calendar was devised by Italian astronomer Luigi Lilio (c. 1510–76) who unfortunately died before he had convinced the Vatican to adopt his system. The baton passed to the hands of the German-Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius (1538–1612) who oversaw its institution under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII (1502–85), hence the name. Unlike the previous Julian calendar, this only allowed for leap years if the date was evenly divisible by both four or, if it was a centurial year, divisible by both four and one hundred. Thus centurial years are only leap years if evenly divisible by four hundred, so 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but 2000 was. Also, by incorporating only ninety-seven leap years every four centuries, the Gregorian calendar stays in step with the solar or tropical year, which is only out of sync by one day every 3,300 years.
Announced by papal bull in 1582, Gregory decreed that ten days had to be lost to facilitate the changeover so in that year of decree the faithful would go to bed on 4 October and wake up on 15 October. Most Catholic countries adopted the new system straightaway but, suspicious of it all being some dastardly popish plot, most Protestant countries shunned Gregory’s newfangled calendar. This proved to be a doomed strategy, as one half of the world became increasingly out of step with the other.
Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and most of Scandinavia capitulated in 1700, and the UK grudgingly followed, along with its colonies, in 1752, but Russia refused to change until 1918, Greece until 1923, and Turkey finally fell into line in 1927. Only the Berbers of North Africa and the religious, all-male enclaves of Mount Athos in Greece still run on the Julian calendar, or modified versions thereof.
Sweden simply didn’t know what to do. Thinking it best to opt for gradual change, they reasoned that if they resisted the temptation to observe Julian leap years from 1700 through to 1740 they would find themselves in step with the Gregorian calendar. But somehow the plan was forgotten as Sweden happily went leap in 1704 and again in 1708, to leave itself out of step with everyone else on the planet. Throwing up their hands in exasperation, the Swedes announced they were going back to their old Julian ways with a double leap year in 1712, and a thirty-day February. Finally, in 1753, they threw out eleven days and went Gregorian.
Naturally, the longer a country delayed the change, the more days had to be abandoned; the UK lost eleven days in 1752 with late starters Turkey, Russia and Greece having to lose thirteen days. But it was in Britain that there was the most confusion, with people mistakenly believing they had been cheated out of eleven days’ pay and would die eleven days before their time. It is widely stated that they took to the streets, raising the cry ‘Give us back our eleven days!’, but this is a Georgian urban myth started by the painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697–1764).
THE RITES AND WRONGS OF SPRING
Another possible ramification of the shift to the Gregorian calendar is the tradition of April Fools’ Day. Because the old New Year festivities culminated on 1 April, even after the calendar change people continued to mark the old festival. Indeed, we are talking about the 1750s, a time when news travelled slowly, so it is more than likely that folks in rural districts remained blissfully unaware of the new calendar for quite some time, leaving them celebrating the ‘wrong’ day. This, no doubt, would have been taken as an indication of stupidity by their more clued-up urban cousins.
While it is true that there are other, much older festivals of upheaval and chaos to mark the commencement of spring, it was not until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar that playing pranks on the unwary became common in the UK so, if not the progenitor of the tradition per se, the institution of the Gregorian calendar can certainly claim a considerable responsibility for April Fools’ Day.
Few in the UK were pleased by the imposition of what was deemed a popish calendar, and it became one of the debating points between the Whigs and Tories in the 1754 election. William Hogarth’s An Election Entertainment (1755) shows a gathering of drunken Whigs and camp-followers in a tavern with a stolen Tory banner lying on the floor in the foreground, inscribed with a demand for the return of the eleven days.
Although there were no actual riots, confusion mounted with the approach of the tax day of 25 March 1753. Prior to the British adoption of the Gregorian calendar the year began, as did the old Roman or Julian year, in March, with a festival commencing on 25 March, Lady Day, leading up to its octave on 1 April – a perfectly sensible seasonal opening of the new year. Because of the abandonment of eleven days the banking and business fraternity demanded that their day of reckoning with the taxman be likewise shunted forward to 5 April, which explains why the UK tax year still turns on that date today.
An Election Entertainment by William Hogarth
MAYAN CALENDAR
Properly known as the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, this was an incredibly intricate piece of stonework that detailed the passing of about 5,125 years, from 3114 BC to the day we call 21 December 2012. Many will remember the headlines circulating in the summer of 2011, warning the gullible that the Maya of Central America had foreseen the end of the world, as ‘proven’ by the fact that their calendar stopped on the aforementioned day of doom and destruction.
The first problem with the perception of the calendar as an indication of Mayan prophetic ability is the fact that they did not devise the system but inherited it from the preceding Olmec culture. The second problem is the fact that the Long Count calendar is wildly inaccurate as, although solar-based, it did not allow for leap years, so, going one day awry every four years, it did not even end on the day we call 21 December 2012.
But the third problem and the final nail in the prophecy coffin is the fact that the calendar worked in bak’tuns, or blocks of 400 years, and at the end of the thirteenth bak’tun – allegedly 21 December 2012 – readers of the calendar were expected to go back to the first bak’tun and start all over again.
Either way, we are still here. As for the prophetic capabilities of the Maya, they didn’t even foresee their own tragic destruction at the hands of the Spanish in the sixteenth century – had they done so they would have stopped chiselling when they got to 1546, not 2012.
THE ISLAMIC CALENDAR
Even before the institution of Islam, the Arab world ran on a lunar calendar, which is why the symbol of the crescent moon has long been of great importance in those climes. In the year the West now calls AD 634, the Muslim Caliph Umar (c. 583–644) set his scholars to work to refine the old lunar calendar by relating it to the life of the prophet Muhammad (d. AD 632) and establishing Year 1, corresponding to the present Western year of AD 622, as the year in which Muhammad fled Mecca for the comparative safety of Medina. Because of this, all years in the Islamic calendar carry the designation AH which stands for the Latin Anno Hegirae, or Year of the Hegira (his journey).
Due to the vagaries of the lunar cycles that disjoint the lunar year from the solar, all Islamic festivals shift about from year to year, with New Year’s Day of our year 2008 (1430 AH) falling on the day we call 29 December; in our 2014 (1436 AH) it was 25 October, while in the year of writing, 2016 (1438 AH), it will fall on 3 October. In 2017 (1439 AH), it will shift back to 22 September. Only every 32.5 years will the dates of the festivals and New Year’s Day in the Islamic year coincide. The Islamic and Gregorian calendars will not match, year for year, for another eighteen millennia, in the year AD / AH 20,874.
Each lunar cycle takes 29.5 days, so the lunar-Islamic year comprises 354 days with the months alternating from twenty-nine to thirty days throughout the year. This leaves every month about forty-four minutes short of the solar month, which rolls up to one full day every 2.73 years. Just as the Gregorian calendar has to add one extra day every four years, the Islamic world has to do likewise every three.
Each Islamic month begins a maximum of two days after the new moon, when the crescent first manifests itself. Muhammad himself decreed that the first, seventh, eleventh and twelfth months were sacred, so it was unholy to wage war or engage in any form of fighting during their span.
The Islamic month best known to Westerners is the ninth, Ramadan, during which all but the frail, women who are either pregnant or breastfeeding, those already embarked on journeys, or those enduring diabetes must abstain from eating from dawn till dusk. The name means to burn, but it is unclear whether this relates to the prevailing weather (Ramadan usually falls in June or July) or for the fasting, perceived as burning bad habits and impurity from the bodies of the faithful.
THE HEBREW CALENDAR
Ill at ease with both the notion of starting their calendar at any man-made marker and also the BC and AD concept because they are still awaiting the Messiah, Jews embarked on the laborious task of totting up the ages of everyone mentioned in the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, to work back to a date of Creation. Designating their calendar scale Anno Mundi or AM, standing for the Year of the World (Creation), we are at the time of writing, in 2016, in the year 5776 which, just to confuse matters further, began at sunset on 13 September 2015 (Gregorian) and will terminate at sunset on 2 October 2016.
All Jewish days run from sunset to sunset, or the point at which the first three stars become visible in the heavens, if you want to get really picky. For practical purposes, modern Jews have opted instead for the point at which the sun is seven degrees below the horizon. Either way, all Jewish festivals begin the night before the day in question: their Sabbath, for example, starts at sunset on Friday evening. And the confusion does not stop there, as Judaism has no clock.
Each ‘day’ is reckoned to be the hours of daylight only, so the length of a Jewish day varies from winter to summer. Nevertheless, this span of daylight – whatever it may be – is still divided into twelve equal ‘hours’, the duration of which, like their days, will vary from month to month. Each of these hours is further divided into 1,080 halakim, or portions.
In the eighteenth century a considerable number of Jews migrated to northern Scandinavia where the ‘day’ can last a month in summer, as can the ‘night’ in winter. Needless to say, this played havoc with their attempts to judge the correct times of prayer and to properly position their festivals of significance.
EASTER AND PASSOVER
Both Easter and Passover are notoriously moveable feasts in that they are both tied to the occurrence of the vernal equinox, when the northern hemisphere starts to tilt towards the sun, signalling the start of spring. This can occur any time between 22 March and 25 April. For the Christian church this is, in the main, a pagan hangover from the old lunar calendar, with few in the UK aware of the Easter Act of 1928 as born of secular disenchantment with the inability of the Church to fix the festival to one specific Sunday. The act demanded that Easter Sunday be the second such day in April, which narrowed the window to the seven days from the ninth to the fifteenth day of that month. Although the act was passed, it still sits sulking on the statute books, as no administration since 1928 has been willing to risk the vote-losing fallout from starting a battle with the Church of England over its enforcement.
Passover presents its own problems. As is the date of Easter linked to the lunar cycle and the vernal equinox, Passover, which often coincides, commences on the full moon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar, which has one foot in Gregorian March and the other in April. The Jewish name for Passover is Pesach, and ‘paschal’ can mean pertaining to either Easter or Passover, which within the borders of Israel spans seven days but for celebrants in other countries runs for eight days.
Allegedly, Passover was born of the Jewish slaves in Egypt daubing their doorways with the blood of paschal lambs, to make sure that the angels of death would ‘pass over’ them when they came to slaughter the firstborns in Egypt. This act of mindless savagery inflicted, the children of Israel got their marching orders in the year that Jewish tradition holds to be 2450 AM (1300 BC).
This system of dating evolved from the labours of Dionysius Exiguus, or Dennis the Humble (c. AD 470c. 544), an influential monk of Scythia in the Eastern Roman Empire, which approximately corresponds to modern Romania and Bulgaria.
In AD 525 Dennis was given the job of calculating the dates of all the paschal full moons and Easter Sundays for the period spanning AD 532 to 626. He had to work on a paschal calendar, which took what we now call AD 284 as its starting point, that being the year that the Roman Emperor Diocletian (AD 244–311) started his extremely brutal reign. As Christians had formed the main focus of Diocletian’s homicidal spleen, Dennis was less than happy about using such a date as the basis of his calculation.
While Dennis’ superiors promoted the date as the inauguration of the Era of the Martyrs, Dennis decided off his own bat that AD, which then stood for Anno Diocletiani, should be supplanted with Anno Domini, ‘the year of our Lord’. Dennis avoided direct questions as to how he decided on the year of Jesus’ birth, which he confidently proclaimed to be exactly 531 years before Year One on the scale of Anno Diocletiani. This he promoted as AD 1, as the mathematical concept of zero was unknown to him: Islamic and Hindu mathematicians had been using zero for centuries but the concept would not gain a foothold in Europe until the close of the sixteenth century.
Few took any notice of Dennis’ suggestion, strangely preferring to remain faithful to the baseline of AD 284. However, AD and BC did start to gain traction in Christian circles with the newly converted Saxons imposing the system in Britain as early as the seventh century. Catholic Spain resisted until the fourteenth century, but some churches never took it to heart; the Egyptian Coptic Church, for example, still perceives AD to be Anno Diocletiani, which is why, for them, this year of writing (2016 minus 284) is 1732–3.
THE IMPERIAL YEAR ZERO
Until 1873, when it switched to the Gregorian calendar, Japan ran on the lunar-solar Chinese calendar it adopted back in the sixth century. But this changeover to Western measurement of time was not welcomed by all, especially not by the Japanese military, which continued to use the old imperial calendar dating from the mythical founding of their nation, the year the West designates 660 BC.
In 1940 the Japanese Air Force received its first delivery of a new fighter from Mitsubishi. In keeping with their habit of designating weapons by the last digit of the imperial year of their inception, as this was the year 2,600 on the imperial calendar they called it Zero.
After the close of the Second World War, the US occupation forces banned the imperial calendar, which now tends only to crop up in obscure legal documents with pretensions to antiquity.
It rarely occurs to observers of the Gregorian calendar that others march through the years to the beat of a different drummer. It may at the time of writing be 2016 for those who follow the Gregorian calendar, for many, but certainly not for all.
In the AUC calendric system 2016 is the year 2769. Standing for ab urbe condita, or the founding of the city (Rome), this system is used by scholars for dating events in the ancient world.
2016 is equivalent to 1465 in the Armenian Apostolic calendar, which began its count in AD 552, the year the Armenian Church split from Rome over theological disagreements.
According to Assyrians throughout the world, their official calendar renders 2016 as 6766, counting from 4750 BC when they built their first temple at Assur on the banks of the Tigris in modern Iraq.
For the eight million followers of the Baha’i faith, mainly scattered throughout India and the Middle East, 2016 is the year 173. Adherents start their calendar in the Gregorian year of 1844, when their first spiritual leader, or Bab, proclaimed he had been granted divine insight into the Koran.
Officially adopted by Bangladesh in 1987, the Bengali calendar makes 2016 the year 1423–4, as counted from AD 594 when the Bengali King Shasanka had a vision instructing him to follow Sanskrit texts on astronomy to construct a new calendar.
For the Berbers and Tuareg, still wrestling with their old Julian-based system, 2016 is the year 2966, as indeed it would be for many other countries had they not jumped ship to the Gregorian calendar.
On the British regnal calendar, as used for countless official documents in the UK, 2016 corresponds to 64–65 Elizabeth II, counting from the commencement of the reign of the present queen in 1952.
In the Buddhist calendar, 2016 is 2560, starting from the year the Buddha achieved parinirvana after his death in 483 BC. Most Buddhists assert that their leader attained such level of serenity in AD 544, but some factions argue for 543 or even 545.
For those in Myanmar, running on the old Burmese calendar, 2016 is the year 1378. With the New Year starting in April, this calendar has undergone repeated restructuring since its inception in 3102 BC, the last of which was imposed in AD 638 when the present count recommenced.
Despite Chairman Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) announcement on 1 October 1949 to adopt the Gregorian calendar, many traditionalist Chinese still use the calendar of the Yellow Emperor (the mythical emperor Xuanyuan Huangdi), whose reign reputedly began in 2698 BC, making 2016 the year 4714.
For many Japanese, 2016 is the year Heisei 28, counted from the death of the Emperor Hirohito (b. 1901) on 7 January 1989, he being the last emperor to be regarded as a living god.
