History of Calendars

History of Calendars:

This information is from the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac, P. Kenneth Seidelmann, editor, with permission from University Science Books, Sausalito, CA 94965.

Another place on the WWW to look for calendar information is Calendar Zone.

by L. E. Doggett

A calendar is a system of organizing units of time for the purpose of reckoning time over extended periods. By convention, the day is the smallest calendrical unit of time; the measurement of fractions of a day is classified as time keeping. The generality of this definition is due to the diversity of methods that have been used in creating calendars. Although some calendars replicate astronomical cycles according to fixed rules, others are based on abstract, perpetually repeating cycles of no astronomical significance. Some calendars are regulated by astronomical observations, some carefully and redundantly enumerate every unit, and some contain ambiguities and discontinuities. Some calendars are codified in written laws; others are transmitted by oral tradition.

The common theme of calendar making is the desire to organize units of time to satisfy the needs and preoccupation's of society. In addition to serving practical purposes, the process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and controlling time itself. Thus calendars serve as a link between mankind and the cosmos. It is little wonder that calendars have held a sacred status and have served as a source of social order and cultural identity. Calendars have provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting, and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and civil events. Whatever their scientific sophistication, calendars must ultimately be judged as social contracts, not as scientific treatises.

According to a recent estimate ( Fraser, 1987 ), there are about forty calendars used in the world today. This chapter is limited to the half-dozen principal calendars in current use. Furthermore, the emphasis of the chapter is on function and calculation rather than on culture. The fundamental bases of the calendars are given, along with brief historical summaries. Although algorithms are given for correlating these systems, close examination reveals that even the standard calendars are subject to local variation. With the exception of the Julian calendar, this chapter does not deal with extinct systems. Inclusion of the Julian calendar is justified by its everyday use in historical studies.

Despite a vast literature on calendars, truly authoritative references, particularly in English, are difficult to find. Aveni ( 1989 ) surveys a broad variety of calendrical systems, stressing their cultural contexts rather than their operational details. Parise ( 1982 ) provides useful, though not infallible, tables for date conversion. Fotheringham ( 1935 ) and the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics ( 1910 ), in its section on "Calendars," offer basic information on historical calendars. The sections on "Calendars" and "Chronology" in all editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica provide useful historical surveys. Ginzel ( 1906 ) remains an authoritative, if dated, standard of calendrical scholarship. References on individual calendars are given in the relevant sections.

The principal astronomical cycles are the day ( based on the rotation of the Earth on its axis ), the year ( based on the revolution of the Earth around the Sun ), and the month ( based on the revolution of the Moon around the Earth ). The complexity of calendars arises because these cycles of revolution do not comprise an integral number of days, and because astronomical cycles are neither constant nor perfectly commensurable with each other.

The tropical year is defined as the mean interval between vernal equinoxes; it corresponds to the cycle of the seasons. The following expression, based on the orbital elements of Laskar ( 1986) , is used for calculating the length of the tropical year:

365.2421896698 - 0.00000615359 T - 7.29E-10 T^2 + 2.64E-10 T^3 [days]

where T = ( JD - 2451545.0 ) / 36525 and JD is the Julian day number.

However, the interval from a particular vernal equinox to the next may vary from this mean by several minutes.

The synodic month, the mean interval between conjunctions of the Moon and Sun, corresponds to the cycle of lunar phases. The following expression for the synodic month is based on the lunar theory of Chapront-Touze' and Chapront ( 1988 ):

29.5305888531 + 0.00000021621 T - 3.64E-10 T^2 [days].

Again T = ( JD - 2451545.0 ) / 36525 and JD is the Julian day number.

Any particular phase cycle may vary from the mean by up to seven hours.

In the preceding formulas, T is measured in Julian centuries of Terrestrial Dynamical Time ( TDT ), which is independent of the variable rotation of the Earth. Thus, the lengths of the tropical year and synodic month are here defined in days of 86400 seconds of International Atomic Time ( TAI ).

From these formulas we see that the cycles change slowly with time. Furthermore, the formulas should not be considered to be absolute facts; they are the best approximations possible today. Therefore, a calendar year of an integral number of days cannot be perfectly synchronized to the tropical year. Approximate synchronization of calendar months with the lunar phases requires a complex sequence of months of 29 and 30 days. For convenience it is common to speak of a lunar year of twelve synodic months, or 354.36707 days.

Three distinct types of calendars have resulted from this situation. A solar calendar, of which the Gregorian calendar in its civil usage is an example, is designed to maintain synchrony with the tropical year. To do so, days are intercalated ( forming leap years ) to increase the average length of the calendar year. A lunar calendar, such as the Islamic calendar, follows the lunar phase cycle without regard for the tropical year. Thus the months of the Islamic calendar systematically shift with respect to the months of the Gregorian calendar. The third type of calendar, the lunisolar calendar, has a sequence of months based on the lunar phase cycle; but every few years a whole month is intercalated to bring the calendar back in phase with the tropical year. The Hebrew and Chinese calendars are examples of this type of calendar.

In most societies a calendar reform is an extraordinary event. Adoption of a calendar depends on the forcefulness with which it is introduced and on the willingness of society to accept it. For example, the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar as a worldwide standard spanned more than three centuries.

The legal code of the United States does not specify an official national calendar. Use of the Gregorian calendar in the United States stems from an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1751, which specified use of the Gregorian calendar in England and its colonies. However, its adoption in the United Kingdom and other countries was fraught with confusion, controversy, and even violence ( Bates, 1952; Gingerich, 1983; Hoskin, 1983 ). It also had a deeper cultural impact through the disruption of traditional festivals and calendrical practices ( MacNeill, 1982 ).

Because calendars are created to serve societal needs, the question of a calendar's accuracy is usually misleading or misguided. A calendar that is based on a fixed set of rules is accurate if the rules are consistently applied. For calendars that attempt to replicate astronomical cycles, one can ask how accurately the cycles are replicated. However, astronomical cycles are not absolutely constant, and they are not known exactly. In the long term, only a purely observational calendar maintains synchrony with astronomical phenomena. However, an observational calendar exhibits short-term uncertainty, because the natural phenomena are complex and the observations are subject to error.

The calendars treated in this chapter, except for the Chinese calendar, have counts of years from initial epochs. In the case of the Chinese calendar and some calendars not included here, years are counted in cycles, with no particular cycle specified as the first cycle. Some cultures eschew year counts altogether but name each year after an event that characterized the year. However, a count of years from an initial epoch is the most successful way of maintaining a consistent chronology. Whether this epoch is associated with an historical or legendary event, it must be tied to a sequence of recorded historical events.

This is illustrated by the adoption of the birth of Christ as the initial epoch of the Christian calendar. This epoch was established by the sixth-century scholar Dionysius Exiguus, who was compiling a table of dates of Easter. An existing table covered the nineteen-year period denoted 228-247, where years were counted from the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Dionysius continued the table for a nineteen-year period, which he designated Anni Domini Nostri Jesu Christi 532-550. Thus, Dionysius' Anno Domini 532 is equivalent to Anno Diocletian 248. In this way a correspondence was established between the new Christian Era and an existing system associated with historical records. What Dionysius did not do is establish an accurate date for the birth of Christ. Although scholars generally believe that Christ was born some years before A.D. 1, the historical evidence is too sketchy to allow a definitive dating.

Given an initial epoch, one must consider how to record preceding dates. Bede, the eighth-century English historian, began the practice of counting years backward from A.D. 1 ( see Colgrave and Mynors, 1969 ). In this system, the year A.D. 1 is preceded by the year 1 B.C., without an intervening year 0. Because of the numerical discontinuity, this "historical" system is cumbersome for comparing ancient and modern dates. Today, astronomers use +1 to designate A.D. 1. Then +1 is naturally preceded by year 0, which is preceded by year -1. Since the use of negative numbers developed slowly in Europe, this "astronomical" system of dating was delayed until the eighteenth century, when it was introduced by the astronomer Jacques Cassini ( Cassini, 1740 ).

Even as use of Dionysius' Christian Era became common in ecclesiastical writings of the Middle Ages, traditional dating from regnal years continued in civil use. In the sixteenth century, Joseph Justus Scaliger tried to resolve the patchwork of historical eras by placing everything on a single system ( Scaliger, 1583 ). Instead of introducing negative year counts, he sought an initial epoch in advance of any historical record. His numerological approach utilized three calendrical cycles: the 28-year solar cycle, the nineteen-year cycle of Golden Numbers, and the fifteen-year indiction cycle. The solar cycle is the period after which weekdays and calendar dates repeat in the Julian calendar. The cycle of Golden Numbers is the period after which moon phases repeat ( approximately ) on the same calendar dates. The indiction cycle was a Roman tax cycle. Scaliger could therefore characterize a year by the combination of numbers ( S, G, I ), where S runs from 1 through 28, G from 1 through 19, and I from 1 through 15. Scaliger noted that a given combination would recur after 7980 ( = 28*19*15 ) years. He called this a Julian Period, because it was based on the Julian calendar year. For his initial epoch Scaliger chose the year in which S, G, and I were all equal to 1. He knew that the year 1 B.C. was characterized by the number 9 of the solar cycle, by the Golden Number 1, and by the number 3 of the indiction cycle, i.e., ( 9, 1, 3 ). He found that the combination ( 1, 1, 1 ) occurred in 4713 B.C. or, as astronomers now say, -4712. This serves as year 1 of Scaliger's Julian Period. It was later adopted as the initial epoch for the Julian day numbers.

Author: David Bishop

Calendars

Last updated: Mar 4, 2011

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