Hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers have no need of such a concept, but commerce benefits from regularity. The original weeks are almost certainly the gaps between market days. Weeks of this kind vary from four days among some African tribes to ten days in the Inca civilization and in China.
In ancient China a five-day week sets the working pattern for the Confucian civil service, every fifth day being a 'bath and hair-washing day'.
Later this is extended to a ten-day week, with the three periods of each month known as the first, middle and last bath. There are two possible sources for the seven-day week. One is the biblical creation story. From those times the Israelites have a week of this length, with the seventh day reserved for rest and worship a pattern reflected in the Bible's account of creation.
The other and more likely source is Rome, where the equivalent of the modern week is adopted in about the 1st century AD - a time and a place where the Jewish tradition would have little influence. The number of days in the week derives probably, through astrology, from the seven known planets - which also provide the names of the days see Days of the week. The Jewish calendar combines lunar and solar cycles. It is given its present form in after a great debate between supporters of two slightly different systems.
In origin the calendar goes back to the captivity in Babylon, when the Jews adopt the Babylonians' calendar and their names for the months. They are lunar months of 30 or 29 days. In every second or third year an extra month of 30 days is added to keep the calendar in approximate step with the solar year. This constitutes a crucial difference between the Jewish and Muslim systems. The Muslim calendar is the only one in widespre ad use to be based uncompromisingly on lunar months, with no adjustments to bring the years into balance with the solar cycle.
The twelve months are alternately 29 and 30 days long the lunar cycle is approximately There are two significant results. Muslim months bear no relation to the seasons, and Muslim years do not coincide with those of other chronologies. There are about lunar years in a solar century.
By the millennium there will have been lunar years but only solar years from the start of Muslim chronology in AH 1 or The year AH will be By the 16th century the seemingly minor error in the Julian calendar estimating the solar year to be 11 minutes and 14 seconds shorter than it actually is has accumulated to a ten-day discrepancy between the calendar and reality.
It is most noticeable on occasions such as the equinox, now occuring ten days earlier than the correct calendar dates of March 21 and September Calculating that the error amounts to three days in years, Clavius suggests an ingenious adjustment.
His proposal, which becomes the basis of the calendar known after the commissioning pope as Gregorian, is that century years or those ending in '00' should only be leap years if divisible by This eliminates three leap years in every four centuries and neatly solves the problem. The result, in the centuries since the reform, is that and are normal leap years, but the intervening , and do not include February Gregory puts the proposal into immediate effect in the papal states, announcing that the day after October 4 in will be October 15 - thus saving the lost ten days.
The pope's lead is followed in the same year by Spain, Portugal, France and most Italian states. The German-speaking Roman Catholic states comply in Other Christian realms drag their feet on the issue, reluctant to admit that the pope in Rome has a point. In the eighth century B. The day calendars had been in use for the greater part of a millennium. In many places, month lengths immediately after that change were not fixed, but were based instead upon observation of the sky.
Month length at that time was simply the number of days that passed from one new lunar crescent to the next. During those years in Rome, for example, a Pontifex priest observed the sky and announced a new moon and therefore the new month to the king.
For centuries afterward Romans referred to the first day of each new month as Kalends or Kalends from their word calare to announce solemnly, to call out. The word calendar derived from this custom. This practice of starting a month at the first sighting of a new moon was observed not only by Romans but by Celts and Germans in Europe and by Babylonians and Hebrews in the Lavant.
All of these peoples began their month when a young crescent was first seen in the sky. During the period when month lengths were not fixed, new moons were usually sighted after either 29 or 30 days. If clouds obscured vision on the thirtieth day, a new month was declared to have begun.
When month lengths were identical with lunations, only those that lasted 30 days were considered to be normal. This was probably because all months had previously been 30 days for such a long period of time.
During this period in Greece, for example, months that consisted of 30 days were considered to be "full;" those that lasted only 29 days were said to be "hollow. After month lengths in the Celtic Calendar became fixed, those that had been given 30 days were termed "matos" lucky and those given 29 days "anmatos" unlucky.
This notion still exists today, months of 30 days in the Hebrew Calendar are called "full" and those with 29 are deemed to be "deficient. In addition to their declaring the beginning of each month based upon a sighting of the new moon, priest-astronomers were also charged with pinpointing the start of a year. By observing the movement of Sirius, Egyptians came to grips with the fact that the year was more than five days longer than their venerable day calendar. This resulted in a change to their method of approximating year length that had been in use for nearly a millennium.
But it also caused them to wonder where the additional days came from. In order to account for these additional days, Egyptians created a myth about their sky-god, Nut. During the reign of the Babylonian king Nabonasser traditionally dated between and B. Instead, they returned to a fixed-length calendar that had 12 months of 30 days each, but with five days added at the end.
Usually at a date later than the mid-eighth century B. These additional days were considered to be very unlucky or unpropitious. Two eastern Mediterranean peoples who did not embrace Islam were early Christians in upper Egypt, whom we now call Copts, and their neighbors to the south, the Ethiopians.
Probably because they were surrounded by Islamic peoples, Coptic and Ethiopian churches never adopted the Western calendar.
Instead, these two isolated pockets of Christianity continued to use the old day calendar. These two calendars are identical except for year number. Copts date their calendar from C. Both of them observe three day years followed by one day year. Their years are divided into 12 months of 30 days each, and the extra five or six days are added after the twelfth month.
Zoroastrians, who began their calendar in B. It consists of twelve day months with five "gatha days" added at the end of the year.
Each of the thirty days as well as each of the gatha days has its own name. They are referred to by that name just as we speak of a day by its number in the month. Beginning in of the Common Era, some modern Zoroastrians adopted the practice of adding an additional day every four years.
He established a new calendar that was essentially the same as one that had been used for some time in Syria. Every fourth year an additional day for a total of six days were added at the end of the year. In Persia under the Sassanids, and in Armenia and Cappadocia the official system of time-reckoning was twelve months of 30 days followed by five more days at the end of the year.
However, Arabian astronomers said the Sassanian year of twelve day months was adjusted to the seasons by intercalating a month every years. East bank of the River Euphrates, about 50 km south of Baghdad, Iraq Palace with legendary gardens built on the banks of the Euphrates river by King Nebuchadnezzar II which might have never existed except in the minds of Greek poets and historians, although recent archaeological excavations uncovered the foundation of the palace.
Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote: "The approach to the Garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier On all this, the earth had been piled The water machines raised the water in great abundance from the river, although no one outside could see it.
The ancient Babylonians used a calendar with alternating and day months. This system required the addition of an extra month three times every eight years, and as a further adjustment the king would periodically order the insertion of an additional extra month into the calendar. The Babylonians, who lived in what is now Iraq, added an extra month to their years at irregular intervals. Their calendar, composed of alternate day and day months, kept roughly in step with the lunar year.
To balance the calendar with the solar year, the early Babylonians calculated that they needed to add an extra month three times every eight years.
But this system still did not accurately make up for the accumulated differences between the solar year and the lunar year. Whenever the king felt that the calendar had slipped too far out of step with the seasons, he ordered another extra month. Babylonia was the ancient cultural region occupying southeastern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers modern southern Iraq from around Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. Because the city of Babylon was the capital of this area for so many centuries, the term Babylonia has come to refer to the entire culture that developed in the area from the time it was first settled, about B.
It was not until the reign of Naboplashar BC of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty that the Mesopotamian civilization reached its ultimate glory.
It is said that the Gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife or concubine who had been "brought up in Media and had a passion for mountain surroundings. Five thousand years ago, Sumerians had a calendar that divided the year into day months, divided the day into 12 periods each corresponding to 2 of our hours , and divided these periods into 30 parts each like 4 of our minutes. Three seasons Assyria and four seasons Anatolia were counted in northerly countries, but in Mesopotamia the bipartition of the year seemed natural.
As late as c. The months began at the first visibility of the New Moon, and in the 8th century B. The names of the months differed from city to city, and within the same Sumerian city of Babylonia a month could have several names, derived from festivals, from tasks e.
On the other hand, as early as the 27th century B. The Sumerian administration also needed a time unit comprising the whole agricultural cycle; for example, from the delivery of new barley and the settling of pertinent accounts to the next crop. This financial year began about two months after barley cutting. Sweden finally made the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in This year has days.
The Earth takes approximately To fix this, we put on extra days in some years, called leap years. He invented the now commonly used Anno Domini A. The Gregorian calendar is thus based on a cycle of years, which comprises days. Since is evenly divisible by 7, the Gregorian civil calendar exactly repeats after years. Lunar calendars are problematic, due partly to the fact that the average lunation is not a whole number. A lunar month lasts This is short of the days that it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun.
It takes 33 years for the cycle of lunar years to get back to the original position. The lunar-moon cycle, when the sun and moon align, repeats every 33 years. But we still use the lunar calendar to mark festivals and decide on auspicious periods for weddings, funerals and more. So, if you were to use an accurate lunar calendar, you would lose 11 days annually compared to the widely used Gregorian Calendar. If you were to use this measure then, lunar calendars are ten times more accurate then the Gregorian Calendar.
The Chinese lunar calendar method is said to be based on an ancient chart that was buried in a tomb near Beijing for nearly years, according to one of the websites.
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