HISTORY OF CALENDARS
Allah Ta’ala says, 'It is He
Who made the sun a shining object and the moon as a light and
measured out its (their) stages, that you might know the
number of years and the reckoning. Allah did not create this
but in truth. He explains the verses in detail for people who
have knowledge.’ (10:6)
Throughout history, different
civilizations have devised numerous ways of keeping track of
time, and documenting the days as they pass, culminating into
various calendar systems. The following article recounts the
development of many of these calendars and shows how they are
tied to the religious beliefs of the people.
Of the variety of calendars in
use today, probably the most well known,are the Chinese,
Hebrew, Islamic, and Gregorian time keeping systems. While
each of these systems is unique in how it is used, they all
share a set of common features, even borrowing from each other
in ways that are not easily recognized. Like all great efforts
that require the dedicated collective work of a group of
people, the establishment of a time-keeping system is no
trivial matter. It required knowing how to make observations,
knowing which observations to make, and knowing how to keep
records over a long period of time.
The kinds of observations
involved in these cases are movements, appearances, and
locations of objects in the sky that sometimes took months and
even years to be seen just once. In order to recognize and
establish patterns of movements, observations had to be
recorded and passed on to succeeding generations. What makes
this process especially remarkable is that since it took so
long, it required people in later generations who were
actually interested enough to sustain the observations. If
certain key observations were not recorded, then critical
links in the chain of observations would be missing, thus
fragmenting people's understanding and lengthening the process
considerably.
A very big incentive, whose
importance was well understood among certain individuals, must
have existed to stimulate so much interest.
DRIVING FORCES
At stake was the capability to
anticipate the future and plan for it. Those individuals who
diligently did this work were held in high regard. Not only
did they have to possess the skills to make and record the
observations, but also they had to be intelligent enough to
derive a solid understanding of the results and have the
ability to provide a clear explanation to others.
It is no accident that these
individuals, in the case of the earliest calendars to be used
by humanity, were mostly "priests." About 5000 years ago, on
the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, people who held
this position were responsible for administering the land on
behalf of the gods and of the gods' earthly representative,
the king. This was not an easy job, because to build a
civilization out of the mixture of swamp and desert that made
up lower Mesopotamia, a network of dikes and ditches for
drainage, and irrigation was needed.
Building and maintaining these
systems required the coordinated labor of a lot of men.
Unfortunately, these people rejected the guidance given them,
and believed that false gods were responsible for the
prosperity of the kingdom. They thought that these gods had to
be appeased with prayer and sacrifice on certain "holy days,"
and that these ceremonies had to be held on the same day in
each town.
For all of this to work, a
time-keeping system was essential. The fusion of religion and
time-keeping began more than 5000 years ago, and still exists
today. The driving forces of anticipating the future,
preparing for it, and coordinating the work of people are ever
significant and so pervasive in a society. A study of any of
the calendars in use today anywhere in the world will reveal
the dynamic interoperability of these driving forces. All of
the time-keeping systems continue to undergo refinement in
their implementation primarily because of these important
issues.
The importance does not come
from what we usually think of when we routinely use a
calendar. "Let's bring together a group of people who are
concerned about the way things are going on this project next
week - Thursday, the 12th of May, at 6 p.m.," are the words
that a manager might use. In this case, we normally say that
all we really care about is that everyone understands when
we're supposed to meet. We say that the name of the day or
month, and the particular time-keeping system that we use, is
really not important.
Try changing the name of the
day or the month. Or try using a different time-keeping
system, then see what happens.
As an example of the importance
of the names used in time-keeping systems, consider some of
the events surrounding the Roman Emperor Constantine's impact
on the calendar in use during his day. One of the first major
changes that he made was to decree the reordering of the
calendar, establishing Sunday as the first day in a seven-day
week.
This decree led to controversy
because it blatantly rejected the long-held observance of
Saturday as the Sabbath by Jews and Roman pagans, who had set
aside Saturday - Saturn's day - as a day to rest and worship.
Among other reasons, the seven-day week was popular among the
Romans because of its astrological significance. In
Constantine's time, seven was thought to be important because
it matched the number of planets (including the sun and the
moon) then thought to be in the sky.
It was thought that each planet
"controlled" a day of the week. The Romans replaced these
names with their own planet-gods. For instance, the day of
Nabu, the Babylonian god of the scribes, became in Latin the
day of Mercurius, the Roman god of communication. This name
survives today as Mercredi in French, miercoles in Spanish,
and so on across the Roman languages.
In English, however, the day of
Nabu is known as Wednesday. This seems to come from the fact
that the seven-day week did not become established in Britain
until the era of the Anglo-Saxon conquests in the fifth
century. These invaders wanted to take on some of the Roman
practices, but kept their own pagan religion and gods.
Consequently, Nabu in Babylon
became Mercurius in Rome, but became Woden the god of poetry
in Britain. Centuries later this
Mesopotamian-Roman-German-British astrological connection has
spread to scores of countries around the world, as people from
Hong Kong to Hawaii pay tribute to otherwise forgotten gods
every time they mention the word Wednesday.
It might seem that today people don't actually care about
religious issues and time-keeping, therefore it should be easy
to pull out whatever religious issues that has been
traditionally part of this time- keeping system and put them
into a separate system of its own. Try that, and see what
happens.
Khalil Ahmad
Al-Jumu'ah Vol.11 Issue1
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Last modified:
July 19, 2007
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