The Calendar

The 5000 Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens, and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days

By: David Ewing Duncan

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Paperback | 6 January 1999

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384 Pages

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17.8 x 12.7 x 2.6

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The 5,000-year struggle to align the heavens with the clock and what happened to the missing ten days.
Measuring the daily and yearly cycle of the cosmos has never been entirely straightforward.The year 2000 is alternatively the year 2544 (Buddhist), 6236 (Ancient Egyptian), 5761 (Jewish) or simply the year of the Dragon (Chinese). The story of the creation of the Western calendar is a story of emperors and popes, mathematicians and monks, and the growth of scientific calculation to the point where, bizarrely, our measurement of time by atomic pulses is now more acurate than Time itself: the Earth is an elderly lady and slightly eccentric – she loses half a second a century. Days have been invented (Julius Caesar needed an extra 80 days in 46BC), lost (Pope Gregory XIII ditched ten days in 1582) and moved (because Julius Caesar had thirty-one in his month, Augustus determined that he should have the same, so he pinched one from February). The Calendar links politics and religion, astronomy and mathematics, Cleopatra and Stephen Hawking. And it is published as millions of computer users wonder what will happen when, after 31 December 1999, their dates run out…

Industry Reviews

All of our lives are dominated by the calendar and run by time. This first general history of the calendar shows how it has changed over the millennia. The Egyptians were the first to think in these terms, as early as 4236BC, and it was Julius Caesar who attempted to impose some conformity across nations in the first century BC. Despite the fact that his Julian calendar gained time over the solar year, it was not until 1277 that the great scholar-monk Roger Bacon pointed out that reform was required and not until 1582 that the Gregorian calendar was finally adopted in Catholic Europe. A further 170 years would elapse, however, before the change was accepted in Britain and only in 1949 could the entire world agree on what day of the year it was. A fascinating account. (Kirkus UK)

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