It's About Time, Part 2

“You may delay, but time will not.”

Benjamin Franklin

Oh, those Romans.  They really got a whole bunch of things going in this world.  In the case of the calendar, they moved the world down the current path on which we reside.

Last we discussed things, we had a variety of cultures who had all developed their own version of the calendar: the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Asians, and the Mayans.  The Romans, too, had a calendar they followed, and it was a lunar calendar.  This early Roman calendar had only ten months.  Before 700 BC, the year began in March and went through December.  Because of this, the words “September”, “October”, “November”, and “December” mean “seventh”, “eighth”, “ninth”, and “tenth” – a fact that seems rather strange now since those are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months in our modern calendar.  In 700 BC, the king of Rome, a guy named Numa, added two months (January and February) and added fifty-six days to the calendar, splitting those fifty-six days between the two new months.  As if things weren’t confusing enough already, priests would sometimes add or take away days to lengthen or shorten the length of a particular leader’s term of office.  Obviously, even though the Romans had a calendar, it was a pretty arbitrary method of keeping time records.

By the time the first century rolled around, along with all these other inconsistencies, everything time-wise was pretty messed up because the Roman calendar was a lunar calendar.  (Remember, lunar calendars mean that eventually the seasons move backwards through the year.)  Julius Caesar decided that the only way to fix the calendar was to bring in an Egyptian named Sosigenes.  Just as a review, the Egyptians knew that a calendar year was more accurate when it was 365 days long.  They also figured out that a day was twenty-four hours, and they even began doing a leap year.  Obviously, the Egyptians had it going on when it came to the calendar.  Therefore, Sosigenes insisted on a 365 day year.

Because the Romans weren’t currently using a 365 day calendar, pandemonium ensued.  In order to fix the mess, the Romans added twenty-three days to February and sixty-seven days between November and December.  In 45 BC, the year had a total of 445 days; this year became known as “The Year of Confusion.”  Appropriate.  J  The extra time created a huge problem with taxes, farming, and just about every other facet of society.  However, once the confusion was over, the Julian calendar went into effect on January 1, 46 BC and was a success for many, many years.  In fact, the Julian calendar is still the official calendar for the Eastern Orthodox Church (Greek, Russian, Ukrainian churches).

Despite all the work that went into developing it, the Julian calendar eventually began to show signs of wear.  In 710 AD, Bede (what a smarty pants) figured out that the seasons were starting earlier than they had 400 years before.  Some countries and towns used different systems than the Julian calendar, which of course led to a haphazard understanding of days and weeks.  But what really exposed the flaws of the Julian calendar were two factors: leap year and Easter.

Julius Caesar had instituted a leap year into his calendar – an extra day in February every four years.  However, after his death, the Romans sometimes did the extra day every three years instead.  Caesar Augustus tried to fix this in 8 BC by re-ordering and adding days to certain months, but it was still not an iron-clad system.  Then in the early 300s AD, Constantine began searching for a more reliable way to figure out when Easter would be.  The Council of Nicea decided it would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21.  (I know.  Re-read that sentence.  This is actually still how Easter is calculated.)  This seemed to work pretty well, but in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII realized that Easter was happening later and later every year.  At this time, only the Pope could commission calendar reform, so Pope Gregory found two men to begin the Herculean task of working out the kinks.  Aloysius Lilius and Christopher Clavius were hired to figure out how the calendar needed to be reformed to keep the Easter problem from continuing to happen.  These two men were scientists and scholars, and spent a great deal of time calculating and re-calculating days and weeks and months.  Finally, they figured out that the only way the European people could truly develop an accurate calendar was if they made some changes to the way they understood numbers.  Without Arabic numerals, zero as a number, and the decimal point, the calendar was doomed to always be a little off.  (Why, you ask?  It’s because of the leap year problem.  Refer back to the last post and how an actual year is calculated.)  Lilius and Clavius are the ones who decided that the leap year needed to happen without fail every four years, in years divisible by four.  (The one exception is that years which end in two zeros that cannot be divided by 400 are not leap years.  So, 1700, 1800, and 1900 all avoided the leap year rule, even though they technically were the fourth year after the last leap year.)  In order to get his people onto what became known as the Gregorian calendar, the Pope removed ten days from October of 1582.  However, the catch is that only Catholic countries went along with this change.  It wasn’t until 1752 that Great Britain and the United States fell into line with the Gregorian calendar.  In both countries, the 1752 calendar went from September 2 to September 14 and New Year’s Day was moved to January from March.  What’s funny is that people in England rioted when this change happened because they believed their lives would be shorter.

For the most part, the Gregorian calendar has been the standard since the 18^th century.  There are some countries who have been slow to adopt it as their official calendar – and the United States still has no official calendar – but by and large, the Gregorian is where it’s at.  Along the way, some countries have thrown calendar temper tantrums, but they have been few and far between.  One such hissy fit occurred in 1792 in France.  The French government attempted to institute an entirely new calendar, one called “The Calendar of Reason” which was a metric calendar.  This meant twelve months per year, thirty days per month, five days left over at the end of the year for feasting and celebrating, ten day weeks (!), ten hour days, 100 minute hours, and 100 second minutes.  1792 was considered Year 1 and the system stuck around until 1806!  Some countries and ethnicities still keep their own calendar (as we’ve previously discussed), but for the most part, the Gregorian calendar is the old standard.

Having done all this research, I guess what I find to be so interesting is that the calendar is one more thing that we take for granted in this modern world.  Until I researched this blog, I can’t really say that I’ve ever thought about why we follow the calendar we do or why it’s 2013 and not 34 or 23,631.  It’s just something that’s always been.  Even things like leap years haven’t given me pause.  As a child, I can’t remember ever being like, “Um…why are we adding an extra day this year that we didn’t have last year and we won’t have next year?  That makes no sense.”  Like so many things in life, the crossing-out of little day-boxes is something we do quite without thinking.  We assume that some benevolent person has created the order of days with our best interest in mind and so we follow that order with nary a question in our minds as to why it is the way it is.  Time seems to be a pretty rock-solid concept these days.

Or, it did until post-modernism rolled around.  Let me give you a little background.  In 525 AD, Pope John I asked a man named Dionysius Exiguus (a monk and scholar) to do some work with the Easter calendar and write out when Easter would fall through 626 AD.  While he was doing his work, Dionysius changed the way that the years had been numbered since Diocletian’s rule.  Before this time, years weren’t numbered chronologically; rather, they were numbered based on kingly dynasties and periods of rule.  In an attempt to create some continuity with how the years were numbered, Dionysius calculated Jesus’s birthday and then numbered the years leading up to Jesus’s birthday by counting down to 1 and then numbered everything since Jesus’s birthday by counting up from 1.  Everything “Before Christ” was labeled “B.C.”  Everything after Christ’s birth was labeled “A.D.”, meaning “Anno Domini” or “In the year of our Lord.”  We know now that Dionysius miscalculated Jesus’s birthday as Jesus was most likely born somewhere in the ballpark of 4 B.C.  However, this has been the standard way of labeling years for close to 1500 years.

In the last few years, a push has been started by scholars and historians to eliminate the Jesus aspect of labeling years.  They want to change “B.C.” to “B.C.E.” for “Before Common Era” and “C.E.” for “Common Era.”  The last time I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I noticed that some artifact was dated using this system instead of B.C. and A.D.  It’s starting to pop up in textbooks and other historically-minded books, as well.  Clearly, post-modern thinkers are really trying to make it so that something that has been for a long time is no longer the norm.  And more specifically, they are trying to make it so that any reference to Christ and when He came to earth is eliminated from our understanding of time.

But I guess what I love is this: they can’t completely eliminate it.  Unless some person is willing to start over and re-number all the years that have ever been, whether the year is labeled “B.C.” or “B.C.E.”, our year numbering system is still based on the birth of Christ, and any informational book about the calendar will tell you exactly that.  Plus, if someone really wanted to re-number all the years that have ever been, how would they know when or where to start?  There has to be some kind of event or watershed moment that a year-numberer would use to create structure.  That, or there has to be a specific moment when time began, and post-modernists aren’t really willing to go there since that would mean something (or Someone) got the clock ticking.  The way time has been organized is not a relative thing, despite the post-modernists’ attempts to make it so.  Maybe this doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but I find great comfort in knowing that our calendars are organized around the moment when time was forever altered.  And no matter how our years are labeled or how people make changes to the calendar in the future, nothing can change that fact.

That’s all for now.  I do have some more thoughts on this topic, and I'd also really like to pass along some information about the Mayans.  I've been doing some reading about their calendar and how it's connected to their belief system and it's pretty interesting stuff.  I don't think the media or your average American knew why the Mayans thought the world would end in 2012...they were just told the Mayan calendar ended.  So I'd like to educate my readers about that a bit (if I can get through the book).  The amount of free time I enjoy each day has been severely limited as I’ve taken on a long-term substitute position.  However, I am teaching a writing class, and it’s given me a stronger motivation to keep up with my own writing schedule.  Check in again next week!