MODERN CALENDARS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20760, 31 December 1930, Page 8

MODERN CALENDARS.

HISTORY OF EVOLUTION.

ROMAN AND JEWISH SYSTEMS.

METHODS OF ANCIENTS.

The days of the old year are ending. Hard on the Christmas festivities we will mourn the death of 1930, at the same time welcoming in time-honoured fashion the advent yof a new year—the 19315t of the Christian calendar. But this is not the only new year to be celebrated in this country. On May 19 next the small Mohammedan community will be welcoming, perhaps not so noisily, hut none the less sincerely, the advent of the 1350 th year of their calendar. Later, and this time with holiday arid religious ceremony, the Jewish community will celebrate on September 12 the advent of the 5692 nd year of their calendar.

A calendar is a method of combining days into periods adapted to the purposes of civil life and religious observances. Being a manmade affair calendars are necessarily imperfect, and their construction and regulation have exercised many brains in the course of the centuries. The addition of a day to February in every fourth year and the omission of this day in some centurial years are contrivances in the Christian calendar rendered necessary by " t he fact that the solar year is a little more than of our calendar days. If such adjustments were not made from time to time, the seasons would gradually slip from their accustomed places and confu- ' ision would result. Based/on Natural Phenomena.

Naturally, the calendars of primitive •man. arid the modern calendars, which are improvements oti them, ore based on three prominent phenomena of our daily lives. The diurnal motion of the sun furnishes our'day, the movement of the moon a,round the sky marks the month, and the movement of the sun through the constellations, causing the seasons, gives us the year. In the British Nautical Almanac for 3931 an article on the various calendars, both , historical and extant, gives a graphic story of the gradual evolution of the calendar to the state of perfection it enjoys at the present time. The Egyptian calendar was made np of a year containing 12 months of 30 da.ySj followed by an added fivß days, making np the 365 days. Their year was divided into three seasons—flood time, time, and harvest time, each season being of four montlis. In 23 B.C. the Egyptian calendar was amended by adding six days instead of five at the end of every fourth year. This served to keep the seasons in the proper positions. The unamended calendar/'survives in a Blightly modified form in the Armenian calendar. Calendar of Ancient Babylon.

The Babylonian year began in the spring. It contained ordinarily 12 months, the beginnings of which were fixed by observation of the lunar crescent. In this* calendar, as in all lunar calendars except the Mohammedan, it was sometimes necessary to repeat one of the months to, keep the seasons in order. The lunar calendar was also favoured by the Greeks, but every community had a separate calendar, all beginning in different seasons. In the fifth century B.C. the Athenians introduced a financial year, based qn a, solar year of 365£ days. Successive improvements were made, until the error in the calendar was only about one day in 160 years. The Roman calendar, which is now used throughout' the world, originally consisted of 304 days, divided into ten months, the year beginning in March. January and February were added later. The calendar gained on the seasons by more thitn half a day in every year, and when Julius Caesar was reigning the Boman calendar was sadly out of tune with the natural year. Caesar therefore added two extra months between November" and December. The names of the months .have since been changed in some instances, but their lengths and the practice of adding an extra day in leap years are the same to-day as in the calendar reformed by Julius Caesar. As the Centuries advanced the gradual shifting of, the calendar dates of tho seasons did jiot escape attention. Accordingly, in 1582, Pope Gregory desired to restore tho vernal equinox to the position it occupied in the Easter tables, namely, March 21. To effect this he decreed that the day after October 4, 1582, should be called October 15. The omission of the added day in those centurial years not divisible by 400 was another feature of the Gregorian calendar, which had the merits of extreme accuracy in its mean values with simplicity in its application. / Tie Gregorian Calendar.

Tho adoption of the Gregorian calendar has been gradual. Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Poland were first, embracing it in 1582. Its adoption in other European countries came later, Great Britain aijd the colonics turning to it in 1752. More recent converts to the system are Japan in 1873, China in 1912, Turkey and Russia in 1917, some Balkan States in 1919. and, finally, Greece in 1923. Turning, to the other prominent calendars still ,in use, the ancient Jewish calendar was a lunar one, based on observations of the crescent of the new moon. It consisted of 12 months, and occasionally an extra month was added, as in the Babylonian calendar, on which it ■was based The modern Jewish calendar •was evolved probably in the fourth century of our era. This new calendar is based on fixed rules, in which nothing is left to observation or discretion. A common year, may contain 353, 354 or 355 days, and'an embolismic or leap year 383, 384 or 385 days. Ten of tho months have fixed durations, the other two varying according to the requisite length of tho yeai 1 . Tho added month always contains 30 days. The calendar is based on the supposition. that the creation took place in the year 3761 B.C. of our calendar. The Mohammedan calendar begins with tho year of Mohammed's flight in A.D. 622. This calendar consists of 12 lunar months, without the addition of any compensations' at all, so that each month goes the round of the seasons in 33 years. For religious purposes the beginning of each inonth is fixed by lunar observations.