Ever wondered what devices or methods did our forefathers use in order to tell the date, the year, or the season? Time is very important not only in today’s modern age but also in the past. After all, without a sense of time, the ancient people would not have known how to keep up with the changing pace in the seasons. This brought about the necessity for ancient calendars. Because of these ancient calendars, the ancient people established a sense of time – something that was much needed then and is certainly much needed now.
The Bases for Ancient Calendars
If the ancient people then had no calendars at all, how were they able to create it? The calendar, after all, is such a wondrous and detailed device that just tells dates with accuracy and precision. The question here is how was the calendar developed in the first place? The calendar we use right now is actually a product of the ancient calendars that have been used in the past. As with the roots and foundation of these ancient calendars, we can point to the sky as the bases of the ancient people for creating and developing these ancient calendars. The sun, the moon and the stars were all used by ancient people in order to determine ancient calendars – the passing of a day, a week, and a year.
Ancient Calendars – Determining a Day, a Week and a Month
Ancient calendars before are more accurate than you think. To measure a day, ancient Romans and Greeks used the sun and moon as determinants of a day. As with the measure of a week and a month, it can be determined by the moon’s cycle. In short, the lunar calendar is one of the bases of ancient calendars. Without the changing phases of the moon, the ancient people would not have had reliable bases for telling the passing of a month or even a year.
Ancient Calendars across the World
When ancient calendars are compared from one civilization to another, a surprising commonality is noticeable. The Babylonian’s ancient calendar, for example, uses an alternate counting of 29 and 30 days per month. An additional month is added three times for every eight years. The Egyptian Calendar, on the other hand, based their calendar on the moon’s cycles. If added, the number of days in a year of an Egyptian Calendar is 365 days. The Mayans, also, had a calendar in which there are 365 days. Noticeably, these civilizations have agreed upon, although unconsciously, that there are 365 days in a year.
Article by TopClock (clocks and watches)
Filed under: Time keeping | Tagged: calendars, Clocks, time, timekeeping
Interesting take on calendars. I wrote a piece on calenders and time keeping systems, how they are constructed, and the basis of calenders as systems, in general.
I hadn’t considered contrasting the similarities of various ancient calendar systems, however.
Still, it makes sense that there would be commonalities: people tend to use calendars for similar purposes, regardless of their culture, and astronomical phenomena (which are the same for everyone, everywhere, and relatively stable over huge stretches of time) are just too useful for timekeeping to pass up.