Happy New Year!
This marks my 30th article in 30 days, and I can truly say I have enjoyed the experience and thought I would put out a more light-hearted, informational one, especially after yesterday's philosophy-heavy one.
Of course, it is a New Year in the Gregorian calendar. But this is not the only calendar system going around.
To first provide some background and definitions: there are four main types of calendar; solar (tracks the sun), lunar (tracks the moon), seasonal (wet and dry seasons), and lunisolar (tracks both).
The oldest known calendar was discovered in Turkey in 2024, dating back 13,000 years. It is a complex lunisolar calendar that tracked time and celestial events such as comets and the summer solstice.
But the history of calendars post that first identifiable one is hard to accurately surmise. The usually agreed upon first is the Sumerian Calendar, which dates back to around 3000 BCE— lunisolar. It had 12 lunar months and 354 days; they would add a month occasionally to sync with the solar year, these are known as intercalary months. This was the real starting point for many calendars such as the Babylonian and Hebrew.
However, the most consequential of these pre-AD calendars is the Julian. As mentioned previously, the Julian calendar was established by Julius Caesar to reform the previous Roman calendar. It helped by establishing a year length of 365 days, creating a leap year system, eliminating intercalary months, and overall making the calendar more scientifically based.
However, the Julian Calendar was out by 11 minutes each year. This, of course, is not a huge amount, but over 400 years it drifted by 3 days. Therefore, the reforms by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct the drift brought the calendar much closer to the solar year and represents the current calendar used largely everywhere.
But this is not the only calendar of note. The two most famous to note are the Islamic and the Mayan Calendar.
The Islamic calendar, also known as the Hijri, was established in 638 AD and was meant to provide a unified dating system for the Muslim community. The calendar begins with the year of Hijra of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD.
This is known as the 'epoch', the starting point for a calendar. In the Julian/Gregorian, we use the Incarnation of Jesus—This was established by a 6th-century scholar, Dionysius Exiguus. However, got the date slightly wrong, as it is speculated that Christ was born around 5 BC (although the records are too loose for a definitive date).
The Islamic calendar is unlike any of the previously mentioned calendars; it is purely lunar. It consists of 12 lunar months with either 354 or 355 days. This is because there are no set days in a month, and they change every year, so each month can consist of either 29 or 30 days. This means that the calendar is 11 days shorter than a solar year and also has no leap year. Hence, why Ramadan moves 11 days every year.
The other is the Mayan, which is actually a misnomer as it is composed of multiple different calendars that count differently. The primary calendar is the Long Count, most well-known for the 2012 phenomenon. This was a internet meme that the world would end at the start of a new cycle in the long count on the 21st of December 2012.
The way the Long Count works is from the epoch of 11th August 3114 BC in our calendar, which is their creation date in Mayan mythology. They then count on a base-20 (we use base-10) system using the following hierarchy:
Kin: 1 day
Uinal: 20 Kins = 1 Uinal (approximately a month, 20 days)
Tun: 18 Uinals = 1 Tun (360 days, which is considered a year in this system)
K'atun: 20 Tuns = 1 K'atun (7,200 days or roughly 19.71 years)
B'ak'tun: 20 K'atuns = 1 B'ak'tun (144,000 days or about 394.25 years)
The result of which is that expressing a date is done by a series of numbers; today, for example, is 13.0.12.3.13. This means that the dates are non-repeating, unlike their other calendar, the Haab.
The Haab’, was a solar calendar used for civil and agricultural tasks. It was delineated into 18 months with 20 days each, giving 360 days a year. There was also an additional 5 days added at the end of the year, meaning it was close to the solar year at 365 days. However, without a leap year function, there was seasonal drift in the calendar over the centuries. Yet, they addressed this drift by adding 13 days every 52 years, which is a rather unique way of dealing with it!
Anyway, I will leave you there with that small history lesson.
This is the final article of my everyday challenge; I’m going to keep publishing but looking to slow down to 2 or 3 a week to give myself a bit more time to reflect and improve each article. As even now my obsessive tendancies have me going back and rewording previous articles.
I’m going to send out another article tomorrow (inshallah) reflecting on the experience and setting out just a bit more about my plans—if that sounds interesting, stick around.
Happy New Year!