The month of July always causes me to think about our calendar system. By the original Roman method this is 2778 A.U.C. (Ab urbe Condita = from the city's founding) The "Julian" calendar was Rome's first calendar reorganization and took place during the rule of Julius Caesar, in the year 45 B.C. The lunar/solar cycles don't mesh, because the moon goes from dark to full in 29.5 days and this does not match the observable solar year. At first, it is not a large problem, but as years advance, the discrepancy becomes a problem.
This "Julian" notion was adopted from the Egyptians. Perhaps Caesar learned of this from his mistress, Cleopatra, who was highly educated and surrounded by a court that included mathematicians and astronomers, as well as the usual priests, historians and linguists. The result was a 12 month, 30 day system, with a day added to adjust the discrepancy between solar and lunar cycles. An extra day resulted in a 366 day leap year which occurred every four years.
The next Western calendar was introduced by Papal Bull during the time of Pope Gregory in 1582, to better align with what the mathematicians reckoned was the sun's orbit around the earth. (They were taking more accurate calculations/observations, but still fitting it into the Church-approved Ptolemaic interpretation of our solar system.) This correction involved a ten day addition to the year. The Gregorian calendar was first adopted by the European Catholic countries.
European Protestants suspected a "Popish Plot" and did not adopt the new calendar until a century later. The English-speaking world only caved to astronomical reality regarding the calendar during mid-18th Century. By this time, Galileo's 1632 assertion that Earth revolved around the Sun was widely accepted. In 1752, England and her colonies finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, adding those ten days. This adjustment kept to the formula of "every four years, a leap year with an added day", but also eliminated leap years on Century years that are not divisible by 400. For instance, the year 2000 had a leap year, while 1900 and 1700 did not.
I have read that George Washington, among others, refused the change on a personal level by retaining their original birthdate, out of synch with the new dispensation or not. This is personal, as he and "share" a birthday. I thought, when I first heard this story that his attitude was rather backwards. :)
It may be 2025 by our Julian/Gregorian Calendar reckoning, but it's rather different in other parts of the globe.
Jewish A.M. year = 5786 (A.M. is Anno Mundi, Latin) "year of the world's creation"
Islamic = 1447, which is the year of the Hegira of Mohammad, his escape from Medina to Mecca, along with his followers.
Chinese = 4728. The Chinese have an interlocking "lunisolar" type of reckoning, where the Sun determines the seasons and the Moon determines the month, using 29.5 days a month, with an Intercalary month inserted occasionally to keep the solar and the lunar in synch. They also have a zodiac of twelve. As we may know, 2025 is The Year of Wood Snake.
~~Juliet Waldron
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