Let's talk about what a calendar is, what it is. This word has had different meanings throughout its history. The term itself comes from the Latin calendae. This is the first day of the month in ancient Rome. Later, the word calendarium appeared - a debt book, in which, on each day of the new month, obligations and interest on them were entered by creditors. But in the Middle Ages, the word has already acquired a modern meaning.

Calendar: definition and brief classification

So what is a calendar in our understanding? This is a kind of reference system for long periods of time with their division into shorter periods (year, month, week, day). The need to coordinate with each other and the day led to the emergence of several calendar systems, or rather three:

• solar calendar,
• lunar,
• lunisolar.

The solar calendar was based on the rotation of the Sun, while coordinating
day and year. Lunar - on the movement of the moon, coordinating the day with the lunar
month. In the lunisolar calendar, an attempt was made to connect all these periods of time.

From the history of the calendar

And now we will make one more small digression into history. A calendar that shows the date, day of the week, month and allows you to calculate how much time is left before some important event was first created back in Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians needed it to count the number of days left before the Nile flooded. By this date, they had to prepare in advance: clean the canals, repair the dams. For them it was extremely important. If they had not retained water, it would simply have gone into the sea, and the harvest would have been lost without moisture. The priests noticed that a very bright star appeared in the firmament at dawn. Now it is called Sirius. It was on this day that the Nile began to flood. Then the Egyptians calculated that this star appears once every 365 days. They divided these days into 12 intervals, each of which consisted of 30 days (now we call them months). The last 5 days they placed at the very end of the year. This is how the "progenitor" of our modern calendar looked like.

Over time, the Egyptians realized that they had made a mistake in the calculations. Indeed, after 4 years, Sirius was late for a whole day. And after eight years, another one ... They found out that the year has 365 days and another 6 hours. The difference seems to us quite small, but for 4 years they run up a whole day. The Egyptians did not change their calendar. And only in 46 BC. e. changes in their time system were made by the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. After that, the calendar was called the Julian. According to him, each of the months of the year consisted of a different number of days (31, 30, and February - 28). One day was added to the shortest (February) once every 4 years. Now we call such a year a leap year. As you know, it has 366 days.

The modern calendar is slightly different from the ancient Egyptian and Julian ones, it has its own nuances ... More careful calculations made it possible to determine the length of the year down to seconds. It would seem, what a trifle all these minutes and seconds. But for 400 years they ran for three days. Consequently, the calendar again proved to be inaccurate. Again, adjustments needed to be made.

In 1582, Gregory XII made his own changes and named the calendar
Gregorian. Time passed. For many years, the discrepancies between the Julian and amounted to as much as 13 days. Europe switched to the time reckoning proposed by the Pope. But Russia for a long time preferred the Julian. In 1918, during the transition to new calendar I had to remove immediately 13 days. In Russia it was January 31st, and immediately came February 14th. And until now, when describing the events of a hundred years ago, many sources often indicate not one, but two dates - the old and the new style. It should be noted that the current calendar, to which we are all accustomed, is also imperfect and contains its own errors. We are talking about an error of one day, which accumulate over 3300 years.

Varieties of calendars

It should be noted that at present the calendar is not just a means of determining the day, year, month. It has a wider application, which means that there should be several varieties of it. We all heard, for example, about children's calendars. And there is also church, astrological, meteorological, etc. Let us briefly dwell on each of them. And let's start with a child.

For the little ones

So, let's figure out what a calendar for children is, discuss what its purpose and distinctive features are.

The baby development calendar helps parents to monitor the growth and changes in the development of the baby: has he gained enough weight? What is his height? Is there any progress in motor development, psycho-emotional? How to properly engage with a child, what first toys to offer him? Each baby is individual, and therefore develops at its own pace, and its achievements may not coincide with generally accepted standards. The task of calendars for children in this case is precisely to help parents navigate the necessary parameters.

We follow the weather

It would be unfair in the course of our conversation to ignore such varieties as astrological, religious, weather calendars. The first two types are well known to us. But the question of weather calendars should be studied more carefully. The history of their origin is interesting. So, let's look at what a weather calendar is and what it is for.

Its appearance is due to the first need of people to systematize
their observations of the weather. The calendar entered information about weather conditions on different days of the year, months, seasons. By analogy with astrological, weather predicted the future state of nature. Such calendars were still in ancient Rome. The peak of passion for them falls on the Middle Ages. In those days, even the "Book of Nature" (1340) was published.

It is easy to imagine how difficult it is to calculate long-term forecasts.
Serving them only on the basis of ordinary signs is simply naive. But many weather calendars have been compiled in this way. And people believed in them. One of these was the centenary calendar. And it arose in the following way. Abbot Mauritius Knauer lived in the 17th century. After a hard war between Protestants and Catholics
the lands were devastated and devastated. Agriculture has fallen into disrepair. Abbot Knauer was very concerned about this. The weather did not please him either. Snow and late frosts in the spring prevented sowing, crops were soaked from the rains, and drought in the summer ruined the crop. Abbot Knauer began to keep a diary of weather observations. Of course, he did not have any meteorological instruments. He simply wrote down his observations, gave subjective assessments. The Holy Father mistakenly believed that the weather depends on the bright stars. He tried to find patterns. The abbot made his observations for 7 years. According to his calculations, the weather was to repeat itself in the next seven years (according to the number of celestial bodies known at that time). However, later he became convinced that his predictions did not materialize. Having failed, the abbot stopped keeping his diary of observations. However, on their basis, he nevertheless published a book-guide for monasteries on farming.

Years passed, and the abbot's notes came to the astrologer-physician Helwig. And he, using them, published a weather calendar for a hundred years, the so-called centenary calendar. Of course, he was anti-scientific. But it was used throughout Germany. And in translations it spread throughout Europe. The scope of its application was quite wide, sometimes the forecasts even coincided. And people quickly forgot about unjustified "predictions" ...

Well, we have examined what a calendar is, how it appeared, and remembered what varieties of it exist today. We hope that the information was useful to you, and you learned a lot of new and interesting things for yourself.

The modern world owes the calendar to the Romans, who, having suffered from the eight-day week, chose the Babylonian system, widely used in the Middle East since the 3rd century BC. The number and order of the days of the week are dictated by the logic of ancient astrology.

In April 1963, the non-fiction writer Alexander Marshak, who was completing a book on the dawn of human civilization, came across an article about a small, strangely carved bone found at Ishango, a Stone Age settlement at the source of the Nile in Central Africa. The find was dated to 6500 BC (this is 3000 years earlier than the first flowering of Egyptian civilization and the appearance of hieroglyphic writing).

For some reason, an unusual subject captured the writer's imagination. Trusting intuition, Marshak plunged into the study of notches on the bone, and in a very short time he managed to "crack the cipher": he realized that this is a calendar, and the marks represent the number of days in successive lunar phases from the first appearance of a new moon as it arrives to the full moon, and then as it decreases until the next new moon.
Not quite sure of his discovery, Marshak went on to investigate dozens of similar specimens from Stone Age settlements, especially from the famous caves. Western Europe decorated with rock art. Gradually some patterns emerged, and despite the initial skepticism of archaeologists, his work began to be taken seriously. Marshak built a completely plausible theory based on household items of modern "primitive" cultures - the Siberian Yakuts and the inhabitants of the island of Nicobar off the coast of Malaysia, whose "calendar sticks" are very similar to prehistoric samples.
Some of the evidence was very convincing. The markings on the bone of an eagle found in Le Placard (France) and dated to the 13th-11th millennium BC are specially applied notches, not random scratches. Tiny notches on the bone matched Marshak's lunar theory. He later found a second eagle bone from the same cave, which was thought to be lost; the striking similarity of marks on both bones convinced Marshak of the correctness of his assumptions.

Only a few archaeologists agreed with all of Marshak's claims. Some of the "notches" he discovered, especially early examples, may indeed be accidental scratches, and not all specially marked items are necessarily calendars. Some of them may represent a completely different type of communication (like the "stick letters" of the American Indians). Nevertheless, Marshak's work produced a subtle revolution in our understanding of prehistoric intelligence. The possibility that lunar calendars existed as early as 30,000 BC is no longer considered outrageous sedition in high archaeological circles.

Marshak is certainly right in his opinion that the earliest calendars were lunar. The moon played an important role in the life of communities that earn their livelihood by hunting and fishing; some animals were only hunted at night.

Unlike the Sun, the Moon does not simply rise and set, but follows a more mysterious path that must have made a strong impression on our ancestors, who lived about 500,000 years ago. The reproduction of such important foodstuffs as fish, turtles and other marine animals is associated with the lunar phases, which govern the ebb and flow of the tides. And it is unlikely that women of the prehistoric era ignored the fact that the female menstrual cycle is the approximate equivalent of a lunar month, consisting of 29.5 days.

Determination of the length of the year

On the other hand, the movement of the Sun also has patterns that determine the change of seasons. Although it is easier to count days by lunar phases than by solar ones (they are shorter and the accompanying celestial phenomena are clearly visible), it is quite clear that there is a period of time between the repetition of important seasonal events, such as a spring flood or the longest summer day, a little exceeding 350 days. It is not so difficult to calculate with relative accuracy the number of days in a year.

Determining the length of the year requires patience and skill, not sophisticated instruments. To do this, you need a flat horizontal surface, such as a piece of land, pebbles and a straight stick stuck into the ground. To check its verticality, you can use a plumb line (a rope with a sinker).

Having prepared an inventory, a hypothetical prehistoric scientist could experimentally determine the length of the year. Every day after sunrise, the peg cast a shadow, the end of which until noon gradually moved towards the peg, then the shadow moved in the other direction. The curve (parabola) drawn by the upper end of the peg could be marked on the ground.

As the year progressed, these curves moved farther away from the peg as winter (when the Sun casts its longest shadows) and closer to the peg as summer (when the Sun is almost directly overhead). With a series of similar curves marked on the ground with pebbles, a patient prehistoric scientist could calculate that the entire cycle from the shortest to the longest shadow is 365 days. He could also determine exactly when the longest and shortest days of the year (the solstices) occurred and on which day the turning points between them (the equinoxes) fell.

At a very early stage in its history, mankind may already have had accurate knowledge of both the lunar phases and the length of the year, sufficient to create a valid calendar. However, here the real difficulties began. The problem, common to all calendars, is that our seemingly harmonious solar system is actually extremely confusing.

One revolution of the Earth on its axis means one day, but 365 revolutions does not equal the time it takes for the globe to complete one revolution in its orbit around the Sun (that is, one year). This time period is 365.242199 days. Similarly, the lunar month is not measured in round numbers: it is 29.53059 days. And although there are approximately 12 lunar months in a year, they are only 354.36706 days - 11 days less than in a solar year.

Try to take into account all these factors in a single system, and you are guaranteed a headache. Therefore, the creation of a valid calendar has become one of the urgent tasks of mankind, the solution of which required a lot of time.

The earliest calendar of which there is written evidence was invented by the Sumerian civilization from southern Iraq. Around 3000 BC, the Sumerians developed a relatively simple calendar for the two seasons (winter and summer), divided into 12 months of 29 or 30 days each.

The length of the month was regulated by observations of the moon; each new month began in the evening with the disappearance of the crescent of the waning moon. To compensate for the difference between the seasonal and lunar years, the Sumerians simply added an extra month when the need arose.

The addition of an extra month, first attested among the Sumerians in the 21st century BC, remained (and still exists in a slightly different form) the standard method of adjusting the calendar. By that time, the Sumerians had also introduced a nominal year of 360 days, based on rounding the lunar month to 30 days times 12. This was in line with their sexagesimal number system (based on the number 60, as opposed to the more widely accepted and currently used decimal system) . Although the solar year is 5 days longer, a year of 360 days is exactly divisible by 60, so it became the basis for the entire calendar and astronomical philosophy of Ancient Sumer. Following the example of the Sumerians, we still divide the sky, and indeed any round object, into 360 mathematical degrees.

Around the same time as the first calendar experiments in ancient Sumer, huge circles of roughly hewn stones erected by the builders of megaliths in Western Europe served as platforms for constant observations of the Sun and Moon. These observations were undoubtedly related to the agricultural calendar. But assumptions about the use of complex programs astronomical observations and calculations for compiling an absolutely accurate calendar are far from the truth.

They come from modern astronomers who present themselves as ancient scientists trying to solve problems that interest them. The real purpose of the astronomical orientations in the stone circles was, in all likelihood, the desire to impress the audience during the annual rituals. The most famous example of such structures is Stonehenge, where around 2000 BC a circle of massive stone blocks (up to 50 tons each) was built, inside of which there is a stone horseshoe with a long axis directed at sunrise on a midsummer day (summer solstice). For observers standing with their backs to the "Altar Stone" and looking through the open end of the horseshoe, the rising sun was framed by a double "window".

The "prophetic bones" used by the rulers of the Chinese Shang Dynasty to predict the future in the 14th and 13th centuries BC show that the Chinese had a lunar calendar similar to the Sumerian. A thirteenth month was added to the twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days every 2-3 years to match the solar year. Later, the need for a reliable calendar increased due to its association with astrology, and one of the main responsibilities of the emperor was to oversee the accurate maintenance of the calendar.

To this end, the imperial court carried out about one hundred calendar reforms, from the first unification of the empire in 221 BC to the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644 AD, that is, about one reform every 20 years.

calendar cycles

Meanwhile, in the New World at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, the highly developed Indian civilization of the Zapotecs led independent work on creating an accurate calendar. The Zapotec calendar is detailed in a series of graffiti around the main ceremonial courtyard of the city of Monte Albán in the mountains of Mexico. Perhaps the Zapotecs despaired of making a connection between the lunar and solar motions, as their system is completely different from those of the Old World. Instead of basing their calendar on a lunar year of about 354 days, they adopted a sacred calendar of 260 days for their religious festivals, the origin of which remains unclear.

However, this allowed the Zapotecs, and later the Maya and Aztecs, to turn the calendar into a kind of bizarre, increasingly complex number game. For 52 years out of 365 days, 73 years of the 260-day calendar pass according to the ordinary solar calendar, and both calendar cycles start counting the year from the same day. The 52-year cycle (18,980 days) has become an integral feature of ancient Mexican culture. When the Spaniards conquered Mexico in the 16th century, they noted that the end of the next 52-year cycle was met by the Indians with great despondency - for fear that the sun would not rise again, and the first dawn of the new calendar cycle caused a stormy celebration.

Even more complex numerical manipulations were performed by the Maya Indians, who, 1000 years after the Zapotecs, worked with a 360-day year; it was called tun and was divided into 18 months of 20 days; The 5 days remaining from the 365-day year were considered "days of bad omens". The Maya also had a 260-day calendar similar to the Zapotec, which they called the Tzolk'in. It was a cycle of 20 named days, combined with a numerical sequence from 1 to 13, that is, it consisted of 20 weeks of 13 days.

Each day had its own signs and associations, so the cyclic calendar is a kind of constantly operating prediction mechanism that directs the fate of the Mayan people. They later combined the Ttzolkin with the lunar calendar in a cycle of 405 lunar months, or 46 Ttzolkins (11,960 days). This calendar system was still in use by the Aztecs in 1519 when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico.

In general, the inhabitants of Central America believed in the magical power of calendar cycles, the most famous of which was the "long count" of the Maya. It was based on a tun of 360 days; 20 tuns made up katun (7200 days), 20 katuns - baktun (144,000 days), and 13 baktuns - the "Great Cycle" (1,872,000 days, or 5130 years), at the end of which, as the Mayans believed, they themselves and the whole world will cease to exist. According to the generally accepted interpretation, the next "Great Cycle" will end on December 24, 2011, i.е. the "end of the world" will come.

The calendar cycle can also be traced in Egypt, although here it supposedly arose by chance, and not according to a predetermined plan. The Sun God has always been the most important in the Egyptian pantheon, so the solar year of 365 days was most respected. But since the solar year consists of 365.25 days, then every four years the Egyptian calendar would diverge from reality by one day. After 730 years, the situation would have become egregious, as the winter and summer months would have had time to switch places.

Such an imperfect calendar did exist in Egypt between the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD, but there is reason to believe that prior to this, the Egyptians, like other ancient peoples of the Middle East (including the Sumerians, Babylonians and Jews), made regular calendar reforms to "to keep up with the times".

This is precisely what is well reflected in the historical documents of the Ptolemaic era in Egypt (323-31 BC), when the country was ruled by the Macedonian Greek dynasty, descended from Ptolemy, one of the commanders of Alexander the Great.
Alexander himself tried to offer the Egyptians the Macedonian calendar, where the lunar and solar periods were "synchronized" through the periodic addition of a new month. But the Egyptians did not accept this innovation.

During the reign of Ptolemy III (247-222 BC), the connection between the Macedonian calendar and the lunar months was formally abolished, and the Macedonian system came into line with the Egyptian one. Under the same king (in 238 BC), a council of priests decreed that an extra day be inserted into the Egyptian calendar every four years to eliminate uncomfortable "quarters" in a solar year of approximately 365.25 days. This simple idea, which became the basis for today's calendar, did not take root at first, and only the military power of Rome was able to hammer it into the heads of the Egyptians, and then impose it on the rest of the world.

Julian calendar

The Romans became interested in the Egyptian calendar because they experienced similar problems. When trying to correct their calendar in 153 BC, the Romans moved the beginning of the year from March 1 to January 1, which made the ordinal names of the months meaningless. Months 7 to 10 began to take places from 10 to 12, and we still keep this confusion: the names September, October, November and December come from Latin numerals (7-10) and reflect the position months in the Roman calendar until 153 BC.

Worse still, the Romans struggled with the 355-day lunar year for centuries with an extra month of 22 or 23 days added in February every two years. The responsibility for regulating the annual cycle rested with the college of pontiffs, whose decision was too often influenced not by calendar factors at all, but by tax collectors interested in extending the year in order to raise more money, or important politicians who received unwanted positions (for example, governors of remote poor provinces) who wanted to make the year as short as possible.

Julius Caesar decided to put an end to these abuses and get rid of the problems associated with the Roman calendar forever. The rapid transformation of Rome from a state limited by the borders of Italy into a powerful power dominating the entire Mediterranean only exacerbated the situation: each conquered people had its own calendar system, so the only solution was the creation and introduction by law of a new universal system.

Julius Caesar

Therefore, during a visit to Egypt in 48 BC, distracting from the ups and downs of his love story with Queen Cleopatra, Caesar spent many long hours in discussions with Egyptian scholars. Of particular help was the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, who advised abandoning the lunar calendar altogether and starting all over again, using the Egyptian solar year of 365 days.

Caesar and Sosigenes came to an agreement that an extra day should be added at the end of February every fourth year: then the calendar year would not diverge from the solar one. This invention, borrowed from the unsuccessful reform of the Egyptians in 238 BC, still exists today.

Julius Caesar introduced the new calendar to the Romans on January 1, 45 BC. To put it into effect, he was forced to issue a decree that the previous year (46th BC) would last 445 days in order to restore correspondence between the civil calendar and the agricultural year. And yet, despite the clarity of the Julian solution, the Roman pontiffs misunderstood it and began to add an extra day to February too often. During the reign of the emperor Augustus, Caesar's nephew, confusion again set in, and in 8 BC he had to issue a new decree that banned the 29th day in February for several years in order for the calendar to return to normal.

In the end, the Julian calendar began to operate correctly throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. The efforts of Julius Caesar and Augustus received a worthy reward: the Roman months Quintilius (July) and Sextile (August) were renamed in their honor.

However, difficulties continued, as the Julian calendar year of 365.25 days was still not accurate enough. The real solar year is slightly shorter - 365.242199 days. This difference of 11 minutes and 14 seconds might not have created much of a problem in one person's lifetime, but it was enough to knock the calendar out of rhythm a few centuries later. To XVI century AD, the difference grew to about 10 days, causing widespread concern. The Pope had to continue the work begun by Julius Caesar and carry out another calendar reform. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed by special edict that an extra day of a leap year should not be added to the last year of a century unless the serial number of the year is divisible by 400 without a remainder. Thus, the leap year should have been 1600, not 1700. The formula is rather approximate, but generally suitable, as it operates with an accuracy of one day in 3300 years.

But according to the reform of Gregory, as well as according to the Julian one, before the introduction of a new calendar, it was necessary to "rearrange the clocks" again. By papal decree, 10 days were to be skipped and counted as the 15th day following October 4th. It is understandable that many people, especially Protestants, were not enthusiastic about this idea. For example, Britain and its American colonies adopted the new calendar only in 1752, when the difference was already 11 days. Therefore, George Washington, born on February 11, 1732, subsequently celebrated his birthday on the 22nd.

When you next write in your diary, think of the scientists and sages who have gone to great lengths to ensure that we have a valid calendar for the next 30,000 years.

Days of the week

As disdainful as many modern scientists may be of astrology, every Friday evening, when they leave the laboratory in the evening and say to each other "see you Monday", they unwittingly follow the principles of the ancient astrological system.

Not only the names of the days of the week, but also their number and sequence goes back to the astrological ideas of the Babylonians. By about 700 BC, they invented the seven-day week associated with the major planetary deities, which we still use today.

The modern Western world owes its calendar to the Romans, who, after suffering for some time with the eight-day week, eventually adopted the Babylonian system, widely used in the Middle East since the 3rd century BC. The Romans simply replaced the names of the Babylonian planetary deities with their Roman equivalents. Thus the day of Nabu, the Babylonian god of writing, became the day of Mercury, the Roman god of trade. Modern French and Italian day names are close to Latin - for example, the Roman day of Mercury became Mercoledi in Italy.

AT English language the translation went through another stage: the pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the English, who borrowed the basic system from the Romans, adapted it to the names of their own gods. In this northern European system (which was also used by the Vikings), Jupiter (the god of thunder) was known as Thor. Therefore, the Babylonian day of Marduk became the day of Jupiter among the Romans, Jeudi among the French, Thursday (Thor's day) among the English, and so on.

But why do the days of the week alternate in this sequence? Except for the pair Sun - Moon (Sunday - Monday) at the beginning of the week, the sequence looks completely random. And although seven days correspond to the number of planetary deities, their sequence does not reflect the traditional order based on the ancient understanding of the structure of the solar system: Saturn - Jupiter - Mars - Sun - Venus - Mercury - Moon.

How is this discrepancy explained? The answer is in another great invention of ancient astrology, which we still use today: the division of the day into 24 equal periods of time, or hours. The planetary deities, in their traditional sequence, govern the hours of the day. For example, Saturn rules over the first hour of the Sabbath; he is followed by six other gods. Then the whole cycle repeats itself from the beginning: Saturn rules over the 8th, 15th and 22nd hour of the day. The 23rd and 24th hours are dedicated to Jupiter and Mars, respectively, and the first hour of the next day is dedicated to the sun god. Therefore, the sun god rules over this day (Sunday).

A simple device was invented to calculate the days of the week from the traditional sequence of planetary deities. By placing the gods at the ends of the heptagram, you can find out the order of the days of the week by following the diagonals. It is not known when and who invented this skillful geometric trick, but a sample of such a figure is depicted in one of the graffiti discovered during excavations of the Roman city of Pompeii.

Thus, the names, number and order of our days of the week are dictated by the logic of ancient astrology. With the establishment of the seven-day week, the Babylonians not only dealt a painful blow to the pride of modern scientists, but also anticipated the discovery made by biologists in the 20th century. Recently it became known that human body governed by a seven-day biorhythm that can be detected by small changes in blood pressure and heart rate, as well as reactions to infection and even organ transplants. The same biorhythm affects other forms of life, even the simplest organisms like bacteria.

Historical chronology of the calendar

It was the most ordinary day, the 3rd until the January non 754 from the founding of the City. The historian Titus Livius worked on his works. There was a "golden age" of poetry (as it will be called later). Virgil has just died. “I sing battles and my husband ...” - all the Romans knew this first line from Virgil's Aeneid and even scratched it on the walls of houses. On this day, however, one drunken joker parodied her: “I sing the fuller and the owl, and not the battle and the husband ...” In those days, Ovid was still working. He recently published "The Art of Love" - ​​"for which he ended as a sufferer / his brilliant and rebellious century / in Moldavia, in the wilderness of the steppes, / far from his Italy."

The day before our events, Horace, passing through the forum, saw slaves nailing copper tablets with the deeds of the emperor. He chuckled: “But I erected a monument to myself ... miraculous ... um, perhaps this should be written down ... hey, boy,” he called his slave.

Things went on as usual. European winter. Just - in the past kalends - interest on debts was paid. There were gladiatorial games. Little by little, riots in Gaul and Britain were pacified. But the time was peaceful: civil wars in Rome ended, and the empire prospered under the wise leadership of Emperor Augustus. He signed several death warrants that day. His friend Maecenas, observing this, sent him a note "Stop, executioner!" and he, having read it, ... stopped. Perhaps this was the most significant incident of the day. Except for the fact that in the distant province of Judea, a boy of about five, playing with other children, stumbled and stuffed himself with a bump. His mother and father did not calm him down for long, because the boy was lively and did not like to whimper for a long time. And not a single person that day knew that exactly in 2000 years Internet visitors would look at this page, and people all over the world would say that the third millennium had begun and would celebrate this event everywhere. However, we do not know what that boy from Judea thought about it. His name was Jesus.

And we are now celebrating the 2000th anniversary of the Christian era. But since the calendar, which is now used by almost the whole world, was created by the “pagan” Caesar, this is also his calendar, a significant date.

It is much easier for us than for the Roman monk Dionysius the Lesser, who in the year 241 of the era of Diocletian was engaged in the calculation of paschals. He did not have the usual dating “so many years before or after the birth of Christ.” This is the date he created. What did he know? From the New Testament - that Christ was crucified at the age of 30 and resurrected on Sunday, March 25 (15th day of the month of Nisan according to the Jewish calendar) - and this is the first Christian Easter. And that his birth was during the reign of Augustus, and in Judea - King Herod. It was also known that the 1st year of the era of Diocletian corresponds to 1038 from the founding of Rome.

Dionysius was given the task of calculating paschalia, starting from the year 248 of the era of Diocletian. And Dionysius, moreover, knew that the dates of Easter repeat every 532 years: the same number of Sundays corresponds to the same phase of the moon. This could make the job of calculating dates easier. Which he took advantage of.

He determined that the next Easter, which falls on March 25, would be in the year 279 of the era of Diocletian, subtracted 532 from this number and received that the first Easter was in 254 before the era of Diocletian. Subtracted another 30 years and estimated that the birth of Christ was in 284 before the era of Diocletian. Hence his proposal - to consider this year the first from the Nativity of Christ.

As a result of comparing the eras of Diocletian and from the foundation of Rome, it follows that this 1st Christian year was in 754 from the foundation of Rome. But then the Diocletian year 241, in which Dionysius worked, becomes 525 AD, and the Dionysian paschalia begins with 532 AD.

Maybe this calculation looks good. Yes, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately!), King Herod died in 750 from the founding of Rome. And Christ was born, as you know, up to this moment! So the beginning of the Christian era does not quite correspond to the date of the birth of Christ (neither the date nor the year of his birth is known to science exactly).

It was illogical for the Christian world to count the years from Diocletian, his worst oppressor. And the proposal of Dionysius was gradually, over the course of several centuries, accepted by Christian Europe. And now we habitually speak and write "BC" or "AD". AT last years began to get used to the designation "from RH".

Theoretically, it makes no difference what moment the beginning of the chronology is taken to be. However, in practice it would be more convenient if this point were referred to a more distant past. Then all historical events would fit into the interval after this point. Thus, the era “From the Creation of the World” is somewhat more convenient than “ours”, the Christian one. Let us now note that in Russia - from the time of the adoption of Christianity - just such an era was used (there are actually several of them, “ours” was adopted in the 7th century in Greece). The circumstances are curious, according to which in 1492 AD the beginning of the year in Muscovy was transferred from spring to autumn.

That spring came the year 7000 from the creation of the world. In this regard, as usual in Russia, the end of the world was expected. But since the end of the world did not come, then, without waiting for the end of the year 7000, the church authorities decided to postpone its (year) beginning to September and immediately announce the year 7001. The end of the world has been postponed.

Further important calendar events occur again in Europe. Pope Gregory XIII finally decided to clarify the length of the calendar year so that it would correspond to the length of the climatic year (in astronomical designation - "tropical"). The "Gregorian" calendar adopted by him for 400 years has not 100, as in the Julian, but 97 leap years. A good balance was achieved between the accuracy of the calendar and the practical convenience of alternating leap years.

But the pope went further and completely brought the calendar into line with the decision of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), according to which the calendar March 21 should fall on the day of the vernal equinox, as it was in 325. This, however, added confusion to the chronology and was one of the reasons why Gregorian calendar was not accepted everywhere and not immediately.

The events associated with the calendar reforms of Peter I are well known (and not least - in connection with the bright and juicy language of Peter's decrees). Peter moved the beginning of the year to January and established the era from the RH in Russia. Go ahead and install the Gregorian calendar (that is, provide more more pressure to the Orthodox Church) he apparently could not.

Lenin, of course, had no problem pleasing the church, and after the Julian January 1918, the Gregorian calendar was established in the civil life of Russia. Russian Orthodoxy is still stubborn and does not show any intention to abandon the Julian calendar. Thus, the Orthodox world is separated from the rest of the Christian world. In some ways, by the way, this is akin to how Mohammed (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him!), Having converted to Islam, established a lunar calendar for the Arabs!

A few words about the 2001 calendar. It turns out that it practically coincides with the Stable Calendar, the draft of which is posted on our separate page. It is only necessary to ignore February 29 (it does not exist in 2001), and attribute December 31 to January 0, 2002.

As a tool for measuring time intervals, the Stable Calendar is given the form of an annular table - like a clock. In this form, the imperfection of our, such a familiar calendar is well observed. It can be seen that a different number of days in months violates the internal structure, which is also superimposed on a 7-day week. But most of all, it is striking that the last day of the year, December 31, is nowhere to be placed in this ring table! The reason is simple: 365 days of the year (or 366) are not divisible by 7 days of the week. It turns out 52 weeks and one (in a leap year - two) day in the remainder. We are so accustomed to this that we consider it as a given from above. And we believe that this is how it should be, that each next year begins with different days weeks.

By no means, however. Familiarity even with our approximate scheme of calendar development can, we hope, lead to the idea that the calendar will continue to improve. And most likely, the next reform will make the calendar stable, as a result of which every year will start on the same day of the week. Make it simple. It is enough to keep the date of December 31st, but remove it from the week and give it a name, for example, "New Year's Day".

In the end, we will answer the question that an attentive reader might have: why did we attribute the beginning of the era to an unremarkable, most ordinary day - “3rd day before January non” 754 a.u.c.? After all, this day corresponds to the 3rd of January ... Why not the 1st? We answer. Part of this is a joke. It is clear that the whole world correlates the coming 3rd millennium with January 1, 1 year. The question, however, is which year is meant - Julian or Gregorian. And if we count back 2000 of our Gregorian years from our January 1, 2001, we will get the day of January 3, 1 Julian year of the PX. The very one that "figured out" Dionysius the Small. You can check.

Dionysius the Small at work.

The advent of the 3rd millennium of the AD certainly prompts us to pay tribute to the creators of the calendar, which has stood the test of time. Let us glorify, first, our energetic ancestors - the ancient Romans and the great Caesar, who gave us this priceless treasure. And let us give special praise to Christ, in whose name the history of all mankind is sanctified.

Calendar history

In scientific terms, a calendar is a system for counting large periods of time based on astronomical cycles - the Earth's own rotation, the movement of the Moon around our planet and the Earth around the Sun. The calendar, although primitive, appeared already in the most ancient civilizations.

The calendar, although primitive, appeared already in the most ancient civilizations, when people began to plan their economic activity and determine when they celebrate their religious holidays.
The history of the development of calendar systems is fascinating in its own way. It reflected not only the process of human accumulation of knowledge about the surrounding world, but also the struggle between politicians and religious ideas.
Even from an objective point of view, building a good calendar is a complex, still not completely solved task. Astronomers, mathematicians, physicists have been struggling with it since ancient times, specifying the periods of motion celestial bodies, then they multiplied and divided these numbers, trying to build an increasingly perfect calendar.
But some wayward despot rulers and religious leaders at the same time seriously interfered with the progress of the calendar system. Chiefs often strove to start counting years from the beginning of their reign, or change the number of days in a year and months as they pleased. In particular, this is why it is almost impossible to establish the exact dates of many famous historical events today.
Not all, of course, priests and rulers did such stupid things. Some even did the opposite: they invited talented scientists to their place and organized competitions for the best calendar for their people. Nevertheless, the great struggle of the mind against arbitrariness continues, and some calendar turmoil is still observed today.

Moon calendar

Already in antiquity, two different approaches to counting days arose - the lunar and solar calendars. The ancient Sumerians who lived in southern Mesopotamia are considered the official inventors of the lunar calendar. The lunar year in the calendar of Mesopotamia consisted of 12 lunar months lasting 29.5 days each, i.e. only 354 days. Since it was much shorter than the solar one (now - 365.2421988 days), the beginning of the year was constantly shifting relative to the spring floods of the rivers. The Sumerians did not like this, and they periodically introduced an additional month to align with the solar cycle.

solar calendar

The history of the European calendar begins in ancient Egypt around four thousand years BC. The agricultural life of the Egyptians was tied to the seasonal cycles of the Nile. Egyptian priests noticed that the annual flood of the great river began immediately after the summer solstice (now - June 21-22). And at the same time, the star Sirius appeared in the predawn sky after a 70-day period of its invisibility.
Having established the connection between these phenomena, the ancient astrologers, on the basis of calculations of the risings of Sirius, learned to predict the beginning of the Nile floods, from which the financial year began.
The Egyptians defined a year as the period between two solstices and counted it as 365 days. It consisted of 12 months of 30 days.
The last five days of the year, which were not included in any month, were holidays in honor of the children of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut: Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys.

Gregorian calendar

The introduction of a leap year, however, did not completely solve the problem.
Since the year of the Julian calendar is still somewhat larger than it astronomical significance, then over time, an error of approximately one day for every 128 years accumulates. For a long time they did not pay attention to this, although they knew. Probably too troublesome this business - the calendar reform.
By the end of the 16th century, this error was already about 10 days. This greatly disturbed the Christian priests.
The fact is that according to the established church tradition, Christian Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The calculation of Easter days for many years ahead was made in 325 AD. At the same time, the day of the spring equinox was mistakenly considered to be March 21 julian calendar. Over the years, the actual date of the vernal equinox shifted closer and closer to winter, and in the 16th century it already fell on March 11th. Along with the calendar date of the spring equinox, Easter and other church holidays were shifted. The Roman Catholic Church took over the improvement of the calendar in the 15th century.
In 1475 Pope Sixtus IV invited the outstanding German astronomer and mathematician Regiomontanus to Rome for this purpose. However, sudden death did not allow the scientist to complete the project. The reform dragged on for more than a hundred years.

Many well-known scientists at that time put forward projects to improve the calendar, but they could not make a decision. In 1582, the Roman Pontiff Gregory XIII created a commission charged with developing a new calendar system. The commission approved the project, the author of which was the Italian mathematician and physician Luigi Lilio, a lecturer at the University of Perugia. He proposed to take 3 days out of every four hundred years according to a certain law. If according to the Julian calendar there were 100 leap years in the four hundred years, then in the Gregorian there were only 97. It was also decided to withdraw extra days added by the Julian calendar since its inception.
The Gregorian calendar is generally accepted today. It is interesting to note that it is not an absolutely accurate solar calendar either. An error in one 1 day in it runs for 3300 years. This, in particular, leads to the fact that now the sun passes through the vernal equinox almost 3 hours earlier than 400 years ago. More accurate calendar systems were later proposed, but they did not catch on.

Calendar in the Orthodox Church

In the Christian world to this day there is no unity in the use of the calendar. The Eastern Orthodox Church immediately refused to accept the Gregorian calendar reform. Many Orthodox today recognize the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar, but they still do not switch to the new one for a number of reasons.
First, in the Gregorian calendar, the Christian Easter sometimes falls on the same day as the Jewish one or even before it, which some Orthodox consider unacceptable. Secondly, according to the old style, church holidays are easier to calculate, since it is consistent with the movement of the moon. According to Archimandrite Raphael: "Through the Julian calendar, its mathematical and symbolic sign system, time is churched in the rhythms of worship, especially in Paschalia."
But, probably, the main reason why the Russian Orthodox Church does not switch to new style is the fear of a split.
According to Yuri Belanovsky, head of the information and analytical department of the Moscow Center for the Spiritual Development of Youth, the Russian Patriarch does not point-blank at the issue of switching to a new style, because he does not see a serious reason for this and because many believers, unfortunately, do not have a correct idea of the role of the calendar in church life.
Most of the believers over the past ten years have not been able to acquire the basic knowledge on the basis of which religious life is built. And some influential Christian Old Calendarists consider the Julian calendar an integral part of their faith and the introduction of a new style can be regarded as the work of Satan himself. In addition to Russian Christians, the Jerusalem and Serbian Orthodox Churches still adhere to the old style today.
Of course, the existence of two calendars - state and church - creates some inconvenience for believers. A witty way out of this situation was found by the Christians of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople and some ethno-Greek churches. They live according to the so-called New Julian calendar. This calendar is formally even more accurate than the Julian, but in the next 800 years it coincides with the Gregorian. We can say that they killed two birds with one stone: they did not, as it were, depart from their tradition, and with big world time agreed.

Astronomical foundations of the calendar

1. Day as one of the basic units of time measurement

The rotation of the Earth and the apparent movement of the starry sky

The main quantity for measuring time is related to the period of a complete revolution of the globe around its axis. Until recently, it was believed that the rotation of the Earth is completely uniform. However, some irregularities have now been found in this rotation, but they are so small that they do not matter for the construction of the calendar.

Being on the surface of the Earth and participating with it in its rotary motion we don't feel it. We judge the rotation of the globe around its axis only by those visible phenomena that are associated with it. The consequence of the daily rotation of the Earth is, for example, the apparent movement of the firmament with all the luminaries located on it: stars, planets, the Sun, the Moon, etc.

Nowadays, to determine the duration of one revolution of the globe, you can use - a special telescope - a transit instrument, the optical axis of the tube of which rotates strictly in one plane - the plane of the meridian of a given place, passing through the points of south and north. The crossing of a meridian by a star is called the upper climax.

The time interval between two consecutive upper climaxes of a star is called a sidereal day.

A more precise definition of a sidereal day is as follows: it is the interval of time between two successive upper climaxes of the vernal equinox.

They are one of the basic units of time measurement, since their duration remains unchanged.

A sidereal day is divided into 24 sidereal hours, each hour into 60 sidereal minutes, and each minute into 60 sidereal seconds. Sidereal hours, minutes and seconds are counted on sidereal clocks, which are available in every astronomical observatory and always show sidereal time.

It is inconvenient to use such watches in everyday life, since the same high point during the year falls on different times of the sunny day. The life of nature, and with it all the labor activity of people, is connected not with the movement of the stars, but with the change of day and night, that is, with the daily movement of the Sun. Therefore, in our daily life we ​​use sidereal time, but sunny. The concept of solar time is much more complicated than the concept of sidereal time. First of all, we must clearly imagine the apparent movement of the Sun.

2. Apparent annual motion of the Sun. Ecliptic.

Watching from night to night starry sky, you can see that at each subsequent midnight more and more new stars culminate. This is explained by the fact that due to the annual movement of the globe in orbit, the movement of the Sun among the stars occurs. It takes place in the same direction in which the Earth rotates, that is, from west to east. The path of the apparent movement of the Sun among the stars is called the ecliptic. It represents on celestial sphere a large circle, the plane of which is inclined to the plane of the celestial equator at an angle of 23 ° 27 "and intersects with the celestial equator at two points. These are the points of the spring and autumn equinoxes. In the first of them, the Sun is around March 21, when it passes from the southern celestial hemisphere to northern At the second point, it is around September 23, when it passes from the northern hemisphere to the southern.

Zodiac constellations. Moving along the ecliptic, the Sun sequentially moves throughout the year among the following 12 constellations located along the ecliptic and making up the zodiac belt.

The apparent movement of the Sun through the zodiac constellations.

Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn and Aquarius. (Strictly speaking, the Sun also passes through the 13th constellation - Ophiuchus. It would be even more correct to consider this constellation of the zodiac than such a constellation as Scorpio, in which the Sun is less than a long time than in each of the other constellations.) These constellations , called zodiac, got their common name from the Greek word "zoon" - an animal, since many of them were named after animals in ancient times.

In each of the zodiac constellations, the Sun is on average about a month. Therefore, even in ancient times, each month corresponded to a certain sign of the zodiac. March, for example, was designated by the sign of Aries, since the vernal equinox was located in this constellation about two thousand years ago and, therefore, the Sun passed this constellation in March. The figure shows that when the Earth moves in its orbit and moves from position III (March) to position IV (April), then the Sun will move from the constellation of Aries to the constellation of Taurus, and when the Earth is in position V (May), the Sun will move from the constellation of Taurus to the constellation of Gemini, etc.

However, the vernal equinox does not remain unchanged in the celestial sphere. Its movement, discovered in the II century. BC e. the Greek scientist Hipparchus, was called the precession, i.e., the precession of the equinox. It is caused by the following reason. The earth is not a sphere, but a spheroid, flattened at the poles. Attractive forces from the Sun and the Moon act differently on different parts of the spheroidal Earth. These forces lead to the fact that during the simultaneous rotation of the Earth and its movement around the Sun, the axis of rotation of the Earth describes a cone near the perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. As a result, the celestial poles move among the stars in a small circle centered on the ecliptic pole, being at a distance of about 231/2° from it.

Moving the north pole of the world among the stars in 26,000 years

Due to precession, the vernal equinox moves along the ecliptic to the west, i.e., towards the visible movement of the Sun, by 50 "3 per year. Therefore, it will make a full circle in about 26,000 years. For the same reason, the north pole of the world, located in our time near the North Star, 4000 years ago was near the Dragon, and in 12,000 years it will be near Vega (a Lyra).

3. Solar day and solar time

True sunny day. If, with the help of a transit instrument, we observe not the stars, but the Sun and daily mark the time of passage of the center of the solar disk through the meridian, i.e., the moment of its upper culmination, then we can find that the time interval between the two upper culminations of the center of the solar disk, which is called true solar days, always turns out to be longer than a sidereal day by an average of 3 minutes. 56 seconds, or approximately 4 minutes. This is due to the fact that the Earth, revolving around the Sun, makes full turn around it during the year, that is, approximately 365 and a quarter days. Reflecting this movement of the Earth, the Sun in one day moves about 1/365 of its annual path, or about one degree, which corresponds to four minutes of time.

However, unlike the sidereal day, the true solar day periodically changes its duration. This is due to two reasons: firstly, the inclination of the ecliptic plane to the plane of the celestial equator, and secondly, the elliptical shape of the Earth's orbit.

When the Earth is on the part of the ellipse closest to the Sun, it moves faster; in half a year, the Earth will be in the opposite part of the ellipse and will move in orbit more slowly. The uneven movement of the Earth in its orbit causes uneven apparent movement of the Sun in the celestial sphere: at different times of the year, the Sun moves at different speeds. Therefore, the length of a true solar day is constantly changing. So, for example, on December 23, when the true day is the longest, they are 51 seconds. longer than September 16, when they are the shortest.

Mean solar day. Due to the non-uniformity of true solar days, it is inconvenient to use them as a unit for measuring time. About three hundred years ago, Parisian watchmakers knew this well when they wrote on their guild coat of arms: "The sun shows time deceptively."

All our watches - wrist, wall, pocket and others - are adjusted not according to the movement of the true Sun, but according to the movement of an imaginary point, which during the year makes one complete revolution around the Earth in the same time as the Sun, but at the same time moves along the celestial equator and perfectly evenly. This point is called the middle sun.

The moment of passage of the average sun through the meridian is called the average noon, and the time interval between two successive average noons is the average solar day. Their duration is always the same. They are divided into 24 hours, each hour of mean solar time is in turn divided into 60 minutes, and each minute is divided into 60 seconds of mean solar time.

It is the average solar day, and not the sidereal day, that is one of the main units of time measurement, which is the basis of the modern calendar. Difference between mean sunny time and true time at the same moment is called the equation of time.

4. Change of seasons

The apparent movement of the sun.

The modern calendar is based on the periodic change of seasons. We already know that the Sun moves along the ecliptic and crosses the celestial equator on the days of the spring (about March 21) and autumn (about September 23) equinoxes. Since the plane of the ecliptic is inclined to the plane of the celestial equator at an angle of 23 ° 27 ", the Sun can move away from the equator no more than this angle. This position of the Sun occurs around June 22, on the day of the summer solstice, which is taken as the beginning of astronomical summer on northern hemisphere, and around December 22, the winter solstice, when astronomical winter sets in in the northern hemisphere.

Incline earth's axis. The axis of rotation of the globe is inclined to the plane of the Earth's orbit at an angle of 66 ° 33 ". When the Earth moves around the Sun, the axis of rotation of the globe remains parallel to itself. On the days of the equinoxes, the Sun equally illuminates both hemispheres of the Earth and on the entire globe day is equal to night. The rest of the time, these hemispheres are illuminated differently. North hemisphere it is illuminated more than the south, at the North Pole there is a continuous day and the Sun does not set for half a year, and at the same time at the South Pole, in Antarctica, there is a polar night. Thus, the inclination of the axis of the globe to the plane of the Earth's orbit, combined with the annual movement of the Earth around the Sun, is the cause of the change of seasons.

Change in the midday height of the Sun. As a result of moving along the ecliptic, the Sun changes its sunrise and sunset points daily, as well as its noon height. So, at the latitude of St. Petersburg on the day of the winter solstice, that is, around December 22, the Sun rises in the southeast, at noon it reaches the celestial meridian at a height of only 6 °.5 and sets in the southwest. This day in St. Petersburg is the shortest of the year - it lasts only 5 hours. 54 min.

The next day, the Sun will rise somewhat east, at noon it will rise a little higher than yesterday, and set a little to the west. This will continue until the spring equinox, which occurs around March 21. On this day, the Sun will rise exactly at the point of the east, and its height will increase by 23 °.5 compared to the midday height on the day of the winter solstice, that is, it will be equal to 30 °. Then the Sun will begin to descend and set exactly at the point of the west. On this day, the Sun will make exactly half of its visible path above the horizon, and the other half - below it. Therefore, the day will be equal to the night.

After the spring equinox, the points of sunrise and sunset continue to shift northward, and the noon height increases. This continues until the summer solstice, when the sun rises in the northeast and sets in the northwest. The midday height of the Sun will increase by another 23.5 and will be equal in St. Petersburg to about 53°.5.

Then the Sun, continuing its path along the ecliptic, sinks lower every day, and its daily path is shortened. Around September 23, day equals night again. In the future, the noon Sun continues to sink lower and lower, the days in our hemisphere are shortened, until the winter solstice comes again.

The apparent motion of the Sun and the associated change of seasons were well known to ancient observers. The need to predict the onset of a particular season served as an impetus for the creation of the first calendars based on the movement of the Sun.

5. Astronomical foundations of the calendar

We already know that every calendar is based on astronomical phenomena: the change of day and night, the change of lunar phases and the change of seasons. These phenomena provide the three basic units of time that underlie any calendar system, namely the solar day, the lunar month, and the solar year. Taking the average solar day as a constant value, we establish the duration of the lunar month and solar year. Throughout the history of astronomy, the duration of these units of time has been continually refined.

synodic month

The basis of the lunar calendars is the synodic month - the time interval between two successive identical phases of the moon. Initially, as already known, it was determined at 30 days. Later it was found that the lunar month has 29.5 days. At present, the average duration of a synodic month is taken to be 29.530588 mean solar days, or 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes 2.8 seconds of mean solar time.

tropical year.

Of exceptional importance was the gradual refinement of the duration of the solar year. In the first calendar systems, the year contained 360 days. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese about five thousand years ago determined the length of the solar year at 365 days, and a few centuries before our era, both in Egypt and China, the length of the year was set at 365.25 days.

The modern calendar is based on the tropical year - the time interval between two successive passages of the center of the Sun through the vernal equinox.

Such outstanding scientists as P. Laplace (1749-1827) in 1802, F. Bessel (1784-1846) in 1828, P. Hansen (1795-1874) in 1853 were engaged in determining the exact value of the tropical year. , W. Le Verrier (1811-1877) in 1858, and some others.

When in 1899, on the initiative of D. I. Mendeleev (1834-1907), a commission was formed at the Russian Astronomical Society to reform the Julian calendar that existed then in Russia, the great scientist decided that for the successful work of the commission, first of all, you need to know the exact length of the tropical year . To do this, D. I. Mendeleev turned to the outstanding American astronomer S. Newcomb (1835-1909), who sent him a detailed answer and attached to it a table of tropical year values ​​compiled by him for various eras:

To determine the length of the tropical year, S. Newcomb proposed a general formula:

T = 365.24219879 - 0.0000000614 (t - 1900), where t is the ordinal number of the year.

In October 1960, the XI General Conference on Weights and Measures was held in Paris, at which a unified international system units (SI) and approved a new definition of the second as the basic unit of time recommended by the IX Congress of the International Astronomical Union (Dublin, 1955).

In accordance with the adopted decision, the ephemeris second is defined as 1/31556925.9747 part of the tropical year for the beginning of 1900. From this it is easy to determine the value of the tropical year:

T = - 365 days 5 hours. 48 min. 45.9747 sec.

or T = 365.242199 days.

For calendar purposes, such high accuracy is not required. Therefore, rounding up to the fifth decimal place, we get

T = 365.24220 days.

This rounding of the tropical year gives an error of one day per 100,000 years. Therefore, the value we have adopted may well be the basis of all calendar calculations.

So, neither the synodic month nor the tropical year contains an integer number of mean solar days and, consequently, all these three quantities are incommensurable. This means that it is impossible to simply express one of these quantities in terms of the other, i.e., it is impossible to choose some integer number of solar years that would contain an integer number of lunar months and an integer number of mean solar days. This explains the whole complexity of the calendar problem and all the confusion that has reigned for many millennia in the issue of calculating large periods of time.

Three kinds of calendars.

The desire to at least to some extent coordinate the day, month and year among themselves led to the fact that in different eras three types of calendars were created: solar, based on the movement of the Sun, in which they sought to coordinate the day and year; lunar (based on the motion of the moon), the purpose of which was to coordinate the day and the lunar month; finally, lunisolar, in which attempts were made to harmonize all three units of time.

At present, almost all countries of the world use the solar calendar. The lunar calendar played a big role in ancient religions. It has survived to this day in some eastern countries that profess the Muslim religion. In it, the months have 29 and 30 days each, and the number of days changes so that the first day of each next month coincides with the appearance of the “new month” in the sky. Years of the lunar calendar contain alternately 354 and 355 days. Thus, the lunar year is 10-12 days shorter than the solar year.

The lunisolar calendar is used in the Jewish religion to calculate religious holidays, as well as in the State of Israel. It is of particular complexity. The year in it contains 12 lunar months, consisting of either 29 or 30 days, but to take into account the movement of the Sun, "leap years" are periodically introduced, containing an additional, thirteenth month. Simple, i.e., twelve-month years, consist of 353, 354, or 355 days, and leap years, i.e., thirteen-month years, have 383, 384, or 385 days each.

Chronology and some calendar eras

An important feature of chronology is its connection with calendar eras - the initial moments of any system of chronology. Such moments are usually some legendary or historical events. Different peoples at different times used their eras.

At the same time, the system of chronology itself is also called an era. So, for example, the era we use is called Christian (it is also a new era or our era), since it counts years from the date of birth of Jesus Christ accepted by most countries of the world.

The origin of the word "era" has a double interpretation. It is generally accepted that "era" is a Latin word and means a single number. However, there is another explanation according to which the word "era" represents the initial letters of the Latin phrase "Ab exordio regni August!", which means: "From the beginning of the reign of Augustus", since in Alexandria there was once a count of years from the beginning of the reign of Rome Emperor Augustus Octavian.

There are many hundreds of eras in the history of culture. With some of them who had enough wide use in the past, we have already met in the presentation of various calendar systems. These are the “era of the Olympiads” (July 1, 776 BC), the era of Nabonassar (February 26, 747 BC), the era “from the founding of Rome” (April 21, 753 BC). ), Diocletian Era (August 29, 284 CE), Muslim Hijri Era (July 16, 622 CE), French Revolution Calendar Era (September 22, 1792 CE) New Style), as well as very ancient eras, such as the Byzantine era "from the creation of the world" (October 1, 3761 BC), the Chinese cyclic era (2397 BC) and some others.

Let us give some details of the history of two eras, one of which, unlike those listed above, is of the greatest importance in our civil life, and the other is no less important in the work of astronomers and chronologists. Here we have in mind the era of the Christian and Scaliger.

Christian era

Where did the Christian era come from, which is currently used in most countries of the world?

The multiplicity of time reckoning systems caused great inconvenience. In the VI century. there was a need to finally establish a single system for the majority of the cultural peoples of that time.

In 525 AD e., or in the year 241 of the era of Diocletian, the Roman monk Dionysius the Small was engaged in the calculation of the so-called "Easter" - special tables for determining the time of the Easter holiday for many years to come. He was to continue them from the year 248 of the era of Diocletian.

Christians considered Diocletian their worst enemy for the persecution they were subjected to during his reign. Therefore, Dionysius expressed the idea of ​​replacing the era of Diocletian with some other one related to Christianity. And in one of his letters, he proposed to continue to count the years from the "Christmas".

On the basis of completely arbitrary calculations, he "calculated" the date of the birth of Christ and stated that this event occurred 525 years ago, i.e. in 284 before the era of Diocletian (284 + 241 == 525), or in 753 from " foundations of Rome. If we take into account that the Paschalia of Dionysius begin from the year 248 of the era of Diocletian, then this should correspond to 532 from the "Christmas" (284 + 248 == 532).

It should be emphasized that for more than five centuries, Christians did without their own chronology, did not have the slightest idea about the time of the birth of Christ, and did not even think about this issue.

How, then, was Dionysius able to calculate the date of the birth of Christ, an event that he claims took place more than five centuries ago? Although the monk did not leave any documents, historians have tried to reconstruct the entire course of his reasoning. Dionysius probably proceeded from the gospel tradition that Christ was born in the days of the reign of Herod. However, this is implausible, since the Jewish king Herod died in the fourth year BC. Obviously, Dionysius also had in mind another gospel tradition that Christ was crucified at the age of 30 and resurrected on the day of the so-called "Annunciation", which is celebrated on March 25th. From the gospel legend it follows that this happened on Sunday, on the day of the "first Christian Easter."

Then Dionysius began to look for the year closest to his time in which March 25 would fall on Easter Sunday. Such a year was to come in 38 years, i.e., in the year 279 of the era of Diocletian and correspond to 563 AD. e. Subtracting 532 from the last number, Dionysius "established" that Christ was resurrected on March 25, 31 AD. e. Subtracting 30 years from this date, Dionysius determined that the "nativity of Christ" occurred in the first year of our era.

But where did the number 532 come from? Why did Dionysius take it away from the number 563?

The clergy call it the "great indiction". It plays a big role in the calculation of Easter tables. This number is the result of multiplying the numbers 19 and 28: 19 * 28 = 532.

The peculiarity of the number 19, known as the "circle of the moon", is that every 19 years all the phases of the moon fall on the same day of the month. The second number - 28 - is called the "circle of the Sun." Every 28 years, the days of the month fall again on the same days of the shortfall.

Thus, every 532 years, the same numbers of months will correspond to the same names of the days of the week, as well as the same phases of the moon. For the same reason, after 532 years, Easter days fall on the same numbers and days of the week. This means that the first Easter Sunday, March 25, was in 31, and it was repeated again in 563.

The absurdity of trying to establish the date of the birth of Christ is so obvious that even many theologians were forced to admit it. So, when in 1899 at a meeting of the Commission of the Russian Astronomical Society on the reform of the calendar, the issue of Christian chronology was raised, the representative of the Holy Synod, Professor of the Theological Academy V.V. The Commission may decide. Scientifically, the year of the birth of Christ (even only the year, and not the month and date) is impossible to establish. It is clear that this statement, made at a closed meeting, was not widely publicized.

Thus, it is irrefutably established that Dionysius did not have any data about the birth of Christ. All the gospel dates to which he refers are contradictory and lack any credibility.

How the Christian chronology was introduced. The chronology proposed by the monk Dionysius was not accepted immediately. For the first time, the official mention of the “nativity of Christ” appeared in church documents only two centuries after Dionysius, in 742. In the tenth century. the new chronology began to be more often used in various acts of the popes, and only in the middle of the 15th century. all papal documents necessarily had a date from "the birth of Christ." True, at the same time, the year from the "creation of the world" was also indicated without fail.

The ruling classes and clergy adopted the Christian chronology because it contributed to the strengthening of faith in the existence of Christ. Thus, the current chronology is completely arbitrary and is not associated with any historical event.

In Russia, as we already know, the Christian chronology was introduced in 1699 by the decree of Peter I, according to which “for the sake of agreement with the peoples of Europe in contracts and treatises”, after December 31, 7208 from “the creation of the world”, they began to consider 1700 from “ the Nativity of Christ."

There are two ways of counting years - historical and astronomical. One of the shortcomings of the Christian chronology by many historians is that its beginning falls on relatively recent times. Therefore, many issues of history and chronology related to the highly cultured countries of the ancient world were considered for a very long time in more ancient eras, in particular, “from the foundation of Rome” and “from the first Olympiads”.

Only in the XVIII century. English scholars began to use the account in years before the “birth of Christ” (ante Deum - before the Lord or abbreviated “a. D.” We used the abbreviation “before R. X.”. In English, “B. C.” - before Christ (before Christ). In Latin, the designation "from R. X." corresponds to "A.D", which means "Anno Domini" (year of the Lord). However, this method of counting, although it is the cause of many computational misunderstandings, still remained in historical science and hence it is called the historical or chronological account, in which the first year CE was preceded by the first year BC, then the second year BC, and so on.

In 1740, the French astronomer Jacques Cassini (1677-1756) in his works "Elements of Astronomy" and "Astronomical Tables" for the first time proposed a year preceding the first year BC. e., conventionally called zero, preceding the zero year - minus the first, etc. Thus, all other years BC. e., of course, except for zero, they began to be denoted by negative numbers. Such an account of years, in contrast to the historical one, was called the astronomical account.

Era of Scaliger

This era is better known as the Julian period. It was first introduced by the French scientist Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), who in 1583 published a treatise called "A New Work on Improving the Account of Time." In it, Scaliger proposed in chronological calculations to keep track of time in the so-called days of the Julian period, and January 1, 4713 BC was taken as the beginning of counting days. e.

The total duration of one Julian period of Scaliger is 7980 years. This number is not arbitrary, but is a product of three factors - 28 * 19 * 15. Here:

28 is the number of Julian years of the solar cycle, after which the days of the month fall on the same days of the week;

19 - the number of years of the Metonic lunar cycle, after which all the phases of the moon fall on the same days of the month, and, finally,

15 - the number of years of the Roman indiction, after which the emergency tax was levied in the Roman Empire. At the same time, the indiction was a 15-year period of time calculation, introduced in 312 by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great instead of the previously used "pagan" Olympiads. It was often used by historians and chronologists to establish the dates of various historical events.

The Julian period of Scaliger has a very important property: the number of days in it occurs continuously and sequentially throughout the entire period from the conditional starting date and is not divided into years. Therefore, the Julian period counting system is widely used in astronomical and chronological calculations.

In astronomy, the Julian period is used in the study of various periodic phenomena. Keeping time in Julian days, we can express the moment of any astronomical phenomenon by a positive number of mean solar days and their fractions with the required degree of accuracy. This makes it possible to accurately determine the time interval between two events, for example, between two maximums or minimums of the brightness of a variable star. Astronomers designate the days of the Julian period (or Julian days) with the letters J. D. or Y. D. In chronology, the Julian period of Scaliger made it possible to link various calendar eras, expressing their eras through Julian days.

Origin of the seven-day week

The seven-day week as an intermediate unit of time between days and months originated in ancient Babylon. From here it passed to the Jews, and then to the Greeks and Romans; from the Romans, it spread widely throughout Western Europe. The seven-day week was also recognized by many peoples of the Arab East.

The Babylonians attributed the number "seven" a magical meaning, considering it "sacred". Such veneration was associated with the number of planets known at that time (which also included the Sun and the Moon).

Probably, the origin of the seven-day week as a unit of time is associated with another reason - with a change in the lunar phases, repeating every 29.5 days. If we take into account that during the new moon the Moon is not visible for about 1.5 days, then the duration of its visibility will be 28 days, or four weeks. And now we divide the period of change in the appearance of the moon into four parts, which we call the first quarter, full moon, last quarter and new moon. Each quarter of a lunar month lasts approximately seven days.

Names of the days of the week. The names of the days of the week are of astrological origin. Even in ancient Babylon, the day was divided into 24 hours and every hour was under the auspices of some planet. So, the first hour of Saturday was dedicated to the most distant planet - Saturn, the second hour - to Jupiter, the third - to Mars, the fourth - to the Sun, the fifth - to Venus, the sixth - to Mercury and the seventh - to the Moon. According to astrological rules, the days got their names depending on which planet its first hour was dedicated to. That is why Saturday is called the day of Saturn.

The remaining hours of Saturday were also distributed among the planets. So, the 8th, 15th and 22nd hours were again dedicated to Saturn, the 23rd hour belonged to Jupiter, the 24th to Mars. The first hour of the next day - Sunday fell on the share of the Sun. That is why it was called the day of the Sun.

Continuing this calculation further, we find that the first hour of the third day fell under the auspices of Lupa, the fourth - Mars, the fifth - Mercury, the sixth - Jupiter and the seventh - Venus. Accordingly, the days of the week got their names, the Latin names of which and symbols are given in Table. one.

Table 1. Russian and Latin names of the days of the week

The peoples of Western Europe adopted from the Romans various customs, as well as many words and expressions. Therefore, in the languages ​​​​of European peoples - Italians, French, Spaniards, Germans, British, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch - many names of the days of the week, borrowed from the ancient Romans, have survived to this day. So, in French, only Sunday (dimanche) is not associated with "planetary" names and comes from Latin words dies domenica meaning "day of the Lord".

in Italian and Spanish the five days of the week retained the names of the planets. In English, the names of days such as Saturday (Saturday - the day of Saturn), Sunday (Sunday - the day of the Sun) and Monday (Monday - the day of the Moon) directly correspond to the planets; the remaining days also bear the names of the planets, but they are named after the gods of Scandinavian mythology Tiu, Wotan, Thor and Freya, corresponding in their role to the Roman Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.

AT German and to this day Sonntag (day of the Sun) is Sunday and Montag (day of the Moon) is Monday, and Friday (Freitag) reminds us of the already mentioned goddess Freya.

Interestingly, in some peoples of Asia, the days of the week are named after the same planets. In India, the days of the week are referred to as follows (in Hindi): Monday - Somvar (moon day)
Tuesday - Mangalwar (day of Mars)
Wednesday - Budhavar (day of Mercury)
Thursday - Virvar (Jupiter day)
Friday - Shukravar (day of Venus)
Saturday - Shaniwar (day of Saturn)
Sunday - Ravivar (day of the Sun)

In Russian, as in other Slavic languages ​​(Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Polish), the names of the days of the week are associated with their serial numbers and with some religious customs. Our names of the days of the week came to Ancient Russia from Bulgaria, a South Slavic country whose culture was at that time at the highest level.

Religious people believe that the seven-day week was established by God himself, who worked for six days, and on the seventh "rested from his deeds." Therefore, the Bible strictly forbade violating the holiness of the Sabbath - a day dedicated to God. This day was a weekly holiday for Christians and Jews. In the II century. n. e. The Roman Emperor Hadrian forbade Christians from celebrating the Sabbath. Then the day of rest was moved to the next day of the week - the day of the Sun. In 321, the Roman emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity, legalized this day as a weekly public holiday.

In Russia, the weekly holiday was for a long time called a week or "week" - a day when "they don't do it", they don't work. Monday means that it follows the "pedel" (i.e. Sunday), Tuesday - the second day after the "week", Wednesday - the average day, Thursday and Friday - the fourth and fifth; Saturday comes from the Hebrew word "sabbath" (sabbath), which means rest, peace.

After the adoption of Christianity by Russia, only one day of the year was called Sunday - the day the Easter celebration began. In the sense of the day of the week, the word "Sunday" began to be used only in the 16th century. in memory of the resurrection of Christ, the word "week" was preserved for the entire seven-day period instead of the word "week".

The Muslim peoples, having adopted the seven-day week, consider Friday as the seventh, i.e. non-working day, as if on this day their prophet Muhammad was born.

The seven-day week played a big role in astrology. In the arrangement of the seven planets relative to the Earth, astrologers have seen for many centuries a kind of mystery, which was expressed by a special drawing. They drew a circle, divided it into seven equal parts, and at the points of intersection put the signs of the planets (including the Sun and the Moon) in the order of their synodic times of revolution or the estimated distances from the Earth. Then two straight lines were drawn from each point to the ends of the opposite arc. Thus, from seven mutually intersecting lines they made up an inscribed seven-pointed star. Astrologers deciphered this drawing as follows: if you go from the top of one corner to the top of the other along their common side, from the top of the second to the top of the third also along the common side, etc., then you get the accepted order of the days of the week. So, if you start from the Moon and go to Mars, then from Mars you will need to go to Mercury, from Mercury to Jupiter, from Jupiter to Venus, from Venus to Saturn, from Saturn to the Sun; from here we return again to the moon. Thus, the entire week will be displayed sequentially - from Monday to Sunday.

Is a seven-day week necessary? The history of the development of calendar systems shows that the "week" is an unsuccessful unit of time, since it does not agree with either the length of the month or the length of the year. In lunar calendars it still had some significance, like about a quarter of a lunar month, but in solar calendars it lost all meaning. One of the first solar calendars, originating in ancient Egypt, did not know the seven-day week. Nor was it in the republican calendar of the French Revolution.

The history of the calendar in science and technology.

The eternal image moving from number to number we call time. Reflecting on this, a person began to climb one of the highest peaks of knowledge, because we are talking about a very important concept: the spatio-temporal unity of the world.

Augustine, nicknamed the Blessed, was looking for time "in the depths of his own soul", and, obediently following this church philosopher of the early Middle Ages, the physicist late XIX in. E. Mach argued that "space and time are ordered systems of rows of sensations."

It took several tens of thousands of years for a person to understand that winter would return in many days with the same steadiness as it left, that the rain would begin as inevitably as it would end. The person realized this and began to "think ahead", to plan not only for today, which "will pass, and thank God," but also for a longer period. For example, for a Russian peasant, it was not the date of January 24 that was important, not religious holiday Saint Aksinya, which falls on her, but the fact that Aksinya is a "half-bread box", and if there is still half of the stock left in the bins, then that means it will be enough until the new harvest.

Year after year, characterized either by hotter summers or less snowy winters, the whole life of a person passed from birth to death. A "natural", phenological calendar arose, which had a purely local significance. Developed over many centuries, it retained its place in the life of a peasant and a hunter even when the authorities sent a priest and a policeman and introduced a unified system for counting days and years.

Moon and month

The moon is filled with an inexplicable charm even for us, the people of the rational twentieth century. It is easy to imagine how she was adored in those distant times, when the silver disk was a living creature endowed with magical abilities. How many poetic legends were dedicated to him!

Among the Slavs, the Month was the king of the night, the husband of the Sun. He fell in love with the Morning Star, and as a punishment other gods split him in half... We meet a strangely similar legend on the diametrically opposite edge of the planet, among the Australian aborigines: a young man-Moon, who fell in love with someone else's wife, was expelled from his tribe and wanders forever in the sky in search of shelter.

Africans from the Namaka tribe say that the good God-Moon wanted to make people as immortal as he is, to make them die and rise again. But the hare decided to harm people and said that they would be like him, the hare: if they die, they will never be resurrected. And it came true as the stupid hare prophesied. For this, the Moon threw a hare with his battle ax and cut his lip, which since then has remained bifurcated in all hares. Almost the same plot can be traced in the tale of the South American Botokuds: the moon can call thunder, lightning, punish with crop failure, and sometimes it falls to the ground, and then people die in large numbers ...

The Vietnamese still have a beautiful custom to contemplate the moon on the sixteenth day of the eighth month of their lunar calendar: a bright face, not covered by clouds, promises a good harvest this year, half-covered by a foggy veil - full bins after the second grain harvest, but what if the sky is completely closed clouds, you will have to wait for a lean year ... Even a European who does not believe in God or in hell, no, no, and yes, he will show the young moon a shiny coin lying around in his pocket: send, they say, more money. And in the old days, the peasant was seriously upset if at such a crucial moment he did not have a silver coin in his pocket.

Festivities in honor of the moon, willy-nilly, were regular, as the change of lunar phases is regular. And man measured his life with these cycles. The interval from new moon to new moon (or from full moon to full moon - different tribes considered differently) turned out to be firmly associated with a silvery celestial body. Not without reason, among many peoples, “a month is a luminary” and “a month is a period of time” are one and the same word.

Seven days

The variety of faces of the moon broke the lunar month into smaller parts. Among the Babylonians we find a seven-day week, but connected not with the phases of the moon, but with astrological rules. The Babylonian priests knew seven celestial bodies, seven celestials: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Each had a special day. There were very complex tables, according to which a favorable moment was calculated for starting a commercial enterprise or a wedding. Only the initiates, the Priests, could understand them.

The common people knew one thing for sure: the last day of the week, which is ruled by Saturn, is the most unfortunate. On this day, they tried to refrain from any work, and the word "Shabbat", "peace" in Babylonian, became the designation of a forced day off, dictated by superstition.

From the Babylonians, the word "Shabbat" migrated to the ancient Jews and, having slightly changed into "Shabbot", brought with it the same order of rest, consecrated no longer by astrological, but by religious, very severe considerations: the Jewish god Yahweh was a formidable god and quick to reprisal. Orthodox Jews hired special servants on Saturday, who were supposed to do all household chores on that day. "Shabbat" and "Sabbath" are heard in our "Saturday", but the day free from work according to the Christian religion is not Saturday, but Sunday. Why? This difference is the memory of religious strife equally honoring Old Testament Christians and Jews.

The Babylonian personification of the days of the week, we see it in the names preserved in English, German, French. "Saturn's day", Saturday, is called "saterdi" by the English, "samedi" by the French, and "sunny day", Sunday, is called "sandi" in English, "sonntag" in German. These names are more than four thousand years old...

The phases of the moon, the lunar months... It's a very natural unit of account, it asks for its own hands. So the Babylonians and the ancient Greeks, Romans and Jews considered the lunar months of the year. The lunar calendar has survived to this day among Muslims. They are not embarrassed that in the lunar calendar, which they adhere to, the same month can fall either in winter, or in spring, or in autumn, or in summer, that in one year, according to European reckoning, they sometimes have to celebrate twice New Year. Why is this calendar so strange? Because, alas, solar system"created" without a plan - the time of revolution of the planets is expressed by incorrect numbers that do not have common divisors. (The time of revolution of the Moon around the Earth is 29.5305 ... days, and the time of revolution of the Earth around the Sun is 365.24219 ... days.)

moon and sun

Twelve lunar months - this is almost the time of the annual revolution of the planet around its star, but "almost" is extremely approximate. The difference is close to eleven days. The moment of the vernal equinox, the holiday of spring and the awakening of nature, which the farmer is looking forward to, will fall on the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar in one year, on the twelfth in the next, and on the twenty-third in another year. An uneducated person, unable to understand the confusion of tables, can only listen to the priest, the bearer of "wisdom".

Not all priests were satisfied with the jumping calendar. I had to resort to all sorts of tricks to stop his run. For the farmer, it is not the phases of the moon that are important, but the seasons, the solar year, determined by the movement of the Earth in a circumsolar orbit. And the lunar calendar began to "tie" to the solar. To begin with, the thirteenth month was introduced into every fourth lunar year: after all, it becomes easier to take into account the shift of days in such a no longer "running", but "swinging" calendar. And then they try to indicate for each day of the lunar year which constellations rise and set at that time. The calendar changes to lunisolar. Religious rites are performed according to the Moon, field work begins according to the Sun.

In 433 BC the ancient Greek astronomer Meton made a remarkable discovery: it turns out that every 235 lunar months, i.e. after 19 years, the new lunar year again coincides with the spring equinox. The Greeks greeted this news with delight. After all, the calendar they used was thus transformed into an eternal one! It was enough to make a table of the days of all the lunar months, to associate the positions of the Sun and the Moon with them - and all the worries associated with calculating the terms of field work disappear by themselves. The nineteen-year cycle was called Metonic. Literally every Greek knew the name of the scientist, stone pillars with his calendar stood on the squares of many ancient Greek cities.

And yet it must be said that the lunar calendar is very inconvenient. Many peoples, who at first gave preference to it, eventually switched to counting days "according to the Sun", for example, the ancient Romans, from whom we received a calendar that is accepted today by almost all of humanity. In other countries, local and religious calendars have been preserved, but entering the international arena, they are forced to use the generally accepted ancient Roman.

The birth of the calendar and the pontiffs

If you believe the legends, the Romans initially lived according to a rather strange calendar: it had only 10 lunar months.

When the new year will come, and with it the calendar account of the days will come, only the priests-pontiffs knew. They watched the appearance of the young moon. When a brilliant crescent finally cut through the sky, citizens were summoned to the Capitol and announced the beginning of the month - kalends. And on the first new moon in March, the beginning of the year was solemnly proclaimed.

But Kalends were famous not only for the beginning of the month. On this day, it was supposed to pay debts and interest. The debt book was called "calendarium" - from it is a stone's throw from the usual "calendar".

On the day dedicated to the first quarter of the moon - "nones" ("nonus" in Latin means the ninth, i.e. 9 days before the "ides" - the middle of the month), the pontiffs announced what and when the holidays were coming in the month that had begun, which for the Romans, with their incredible polytheism, was information of particular value. The Romans did not count the days sequentially, as we do, but differently. They said: "So many days before Kalends, Nones, Ides."

The ten-month calendar did not last long. In 700 BC, according to the legend, the second Roman king Numa Pompilius, who considered himself a direct descendant of the sacred Romulus, added two more months: Januarius, named after Janus, the two-faced god of entrances and exits (and not at all a duplicitous villain, as the ignorant barbarians considered him), and februarius, whose name was reminiscent of Februs, the god of the underworld of the dead, is a sad month, which is why they made it the shortest, 28 days. The beginning of the year still fell on spring martius - the month of field work, which was patronized by Mars, then still the god of spring shoots, and not bloody wars. Then came Aprilis, the month when buds (“aperire”) open on the trees; mayus, glorifying the goddess of fertility Maya; and finally, the Junius, dedicated to Juno, the goddess of the sky, the wife of Jupiter, "the queen of gods and people."

For some reason, months from the fifth to the tenth were not given to any gods and were simply called quintilis, sextilis, september, october, november and desember. Numa Pompilius turned out to be a bad astronomer. His year turned out to be short, only 355 days, ten and a quarter less than required.

So that the beginning of the year does not jump, so that the holidays in honor of the gods do not move, the pontiffs introduced an additional month between February 23 and 24 - marcedonius, which got its name from the verb "marzere" - to fade. Marcedonius, as it were, withered for two years, and then reappeared inside the februarius - sometimes 22, sometimes 23 days long. The system, to be sure, is complex, requiring vigilant attention. And just the pontiffs did not have enough attention. Very soon they got confused and did not find anything better than to get permission to make an intercalary month of such a length "as needed." This happened in 191 BC, and for almost a hundred and fifty years after this event, the pontiffs were engaged in the most amazing underground trade - the trade in marcedonius days.

Suddenly shortening the year, they brought down sudden kalends on unsuspecting debtors. If necessary, they removed the objectionable consul, whose powers suddenly ended. But for a necessary and generous person, the year, as if by magic, stretched out.

No one tried to fight the willfulness of the pontiffs. They were too powerful and too powerful people supported them. And the calendar... The calendar got so confused that it turned into a true national disaster.

"The Roman generals always won," Voltaire quipped, "but they never knew what day they did it."

The first Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar was not only an emperor, but also a great pontiff. He possessed the fullness of power that was needed to put an end to the calendar disorder, which is destructive to the economy and trade. The emperor invited the famous Egyptian astronomer Sosigenes to Rome.

The Egyptians had three seasons: flood, sowing, harvest. Each has four months. Inside the month there are three ten days - decades (i.e. six five days - pentads). Only 360 days. Mistake in five days. But this is the calendar of the fourth millennium BC. Astronomical knowledge still clearly lacked depth. Several centuries pass, and we see an addition: five more are added to 360 days, holidays in honor of the children of the god of the earth Geb and his wife Nut - Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys.

Now we know that this figure - 365 days - differs from the true length of the year by a quarter of a day. But this difference could not yet be felt by the astronomers of the Old Kingdom. However, soon the servants of Isis discovered that every four years this brilliant luminary was one day late with the sunrise. The story with the lunar calendar repeated itself, only with a longer period. In order for Sothis to rise again on the first day of the month "that", 1461 Egyptian years (1460 years according to modern chronology) were required. This return of the star was celebrated with a solemn feast in honor of Eternity...

In 238 BC King Ptolemy Everget, a descendant of the Greek commander Ptolemy, who served in the victorious troops of Alexander the Great and conquered Egypt for Greece, ordered: to celebrate another holiday every four years, in honor of the patron gods of Everget. An annual quarter day was added to the calendar, and its run slowed down so much that one extra day began to run every 128 years. Such a small error seemed insignificant to the then astronomers.

A similar calendar was proposed to Julius Caesar by Sosigen. The emperor decided to reform in 46 BC. By that time, the Roman calendar had diverged from the solar calendar by 70 days at the mercy of negligent pontiffs, and another ten days had to be added so that the year would become of normal length. Finally, according to the principle of "chopping, so in one fell swoop", Julius Caesar moved the beginning of the year to 1 Januarius, the date of entry into office of the newly elected consuls. And although it turned out to be a mere accident that the full moon, so revered by the Romans, fell on the first Januarius, the great pontiff did not fail to take advantage of this circumstance: he said that the gods themselves were favorable to innovation. Well, the year - the year turned out to be the longest in the history of Rome, at 445 days. So it was called: "the year of great confusion."

An additional day (the same one that Euergetes added) was left in place of the former marcedonius, between February 23 and 24, six days before the March calends. The sixth in Latin means "sextus", and the doubled sixth is "bissextus". The word came to the Russian language through the Greeks, who instead of "b" said "v"; We call a bissex year a leap year.

Caesar did not forget himself. The month of quintilis was renamed "Julius" by the obsequious senate at the wish of the emperor, writes the ancient Roman historian Suetonius.

Caesar's successor, Emperor Octavian Augustus, followed suit and immortalized his name by renaming the sextilis after himself. He also rearranged the number of days in months, so that he would certainly have a lucky odd number of days in "his". It was in this form that the popes and emperors of Constantinople got the calendar - almost the same one by which we live. The difference is in the name: we inherited the Julian from the Romans, but we live according to the Gregorian. The difference between them seems to be insignificant, by three-quarters of a day in a century, but the meaning is enormous.

Gregorian calendar

Sosigen, following Euergetes, did not attach importance to one extra day, which had run over 128 years. He neglected the results of the observations of the great astronomer of antiquity, Hipparchus, who, back in the 2nd century. BC. found that the year does not last 365.25 days, but a little less (according to recent observations, by 0.0078 days). The Julian year turned out to be a little slower than the hands of the sundial. However, the Romans did not have time to feel this “flaw” in any serious way. Rome as a state ended when the difference between calendar and solar time did not even reach three days. That's who had to worry - so it's the Christians.

At the end of the XIV century. the Christian church, which adopted the Julian calendar as the basis for chronology, suddenly discovered that the spring equinox no longer coincides with March 21, and moreover, every 128 years it comes one more day earlier. Meanwhile, according to the decree of the Council of Nicaea (it took place in 325), the equinox was obliged "forever" to fall precisely on March 21, as it was in the year of the council. It was necessary to bring the calendar "in order", and the first voices about this were heard in Byzantium, the most zealous guardian of the canons. But canons are canons, and reform by reform is a dangerous business. Emperor Andronicus decided that the innovation would cause nothing but ecclesiastical troubles, and rejected all proposals (although, as the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary says, a certain Nicephorus Gregory "suggested to change the calendar on the same principles on which this matter was subsequently carried out by Pope Gregory XIII" ).

In the Western, Roman church, under the sign of proposals for the reform of the calendar, the entire 15th and first half of the 16th centuries passed. To solve the problem, the famous Nuremberg astronomer Regiomontanus, who became famous for his astronomical calendar, which was used by Columbus himself, was invited to Rome. Alas, as soon as he arrived, the scientist fell ill and died. The question of changes was again put on hold. He talked about how to correct the calendar, and the V Lutheran Council, held at the very beginning of the 16th century. In particular, Copernicus presented his opinion to the audience: he believed that the length of the year was not yet known with the accuracy that would guarantee against errors in the future. The Church Council of Trent in 1563 instructed Pope Pius IV to take the matter of calendar reform, as they say, under personal control. But the nut was tough. Pius IV died, he was replaced by Pius V, then Gregory XIII appeared on the throne, and what the new calendar would be, the disputes went on and on.

In the meantime, a project remarkably simple in all respects had already been worked out. Its author was the doctor Aloysius Liglio, who lived in the Italian city of Perugia, a professor of medicine at a local university. To stop the movement of the calendar, he proposed simply throwing away the extra days accumulated since the time of Julius Caesar, and then considering leap years those years that are divisible by 4 and not divisible by 100. Liglio finished his calculations in 1576. But he did not have time to present the project to the papal commission : even a slight malaise in that era turned into a fatal disease ... The scientist's papers were taken to Rome by his brother. It rarely happens that even the most remarkable project passes through the commissions without remarks: each of the members of the meeting believes that he is no more stupid than the author and is striving to demonstrate this with might and main. But Lillo's project proved to be so impeccably executed that it was accepted without a single amendment.

Pope Gregory XIII approved the commission's decision by issuing the bull "Iter gravissimo ...": all Christians were ordered to consider October 5, 1582, not the fifth, but immediately October 15.

"Gregorian style" was immediately adopted in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands. A year later, it was introduced by Poland, the German states, Switzerland. Conservative England waited until 1751, and then "killed two birds with one stone": they corrected the calendar and moved the beginning of 1752 from March 25 to January 1. Some of the British took the reform as a true robbery: it's no joke, three whole months of life disappeared! They say that some ladies seriously demanded that the government return their "stolen ninety-four days" ...

Even more conservative were the "fathers" of the Eastern Orthodox Church. They still live according to the Julian calendar. And they not only live, but tried as much as possible (very successfully in tsarist Russia) to prevent the transition to a new style. They objected, for example, to it because the Easter holiday, if calculated on the basis of the Gregorian calendar, can sometimes coincide with the Jewish Passover, a thing that is unacceptable according to Christian canons. But the main thing, of course, was not this circumstance, but the desire to emphasize their independence from Rome.

In Russia, representatives of the secular authorities also stood in the same ranks with the clergy, but for reasons of "protective" order. The well-known reactionary Prince Lieven, Minister of Public Education, wrote in 1830 that "due to the ignorance of the masses of the people, the inconveniences associated with the reform will far exceed the expected benefits." According to the sad Russian tradition, the opinion of the titled obscurantist prevailed over the scientific work of half a dozen academicians, who, with facts in their hands, tried to prove to the government the urgent need to switch to a new calendar "for the sake of convenience of trade, improvement of communication lines, expansion of ties with other peoples and scientific activity."

The October Revolution, which eliminated all institutions of power, easily resolved the issue of the calendar reform. By a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of January 26, 1918, after January 31, it was no longer February 1, but immediately the fourteenth.

Chronology

A calendar for one year is, of course, important, but that's not all. There is also such a thing as chronology, the counting of years, which arose much later than the calendar. Concentrated history, as it is sometimes called. And in fact, do dry dates say little to the imagination of a person who is well acquainted with history: 1914, 1917, 1941, 1945? ..

That's what's interesting. Calling the year "one thousand nine hundred and fourteen", we do not at all think that this is the year from the "nativity of Christ", and the "nativity" itself was calculated by the monk Dionysius the Small in 525 AD.

At the time when Dionysius lived, his "discovery" went unnoticed. Until 1431, all the encyclicals of the Pope date from "the creation of the world," and the "most Christian" Spanish church up to the 12th century took as the beginning of the countdown not even this date consecrated by the authority of the popes, but AD 38, when the emperor Octavian Augustus granted the conquered Iberians who inhabited the Iberian Peninsula the status of inhabitants of a Roman province.

From the creation of the world, years were also counted in Russia, or rather, from the creation of Adam, which (in accordance with the decision of the Council of Nicaea) took place on March 1, 1st year of creation, on Friday. 1492 was, for example, the year 7000 from the creation of the world. It was supposed to start in March, but Tsar Ivan III did not take into account the traditions and postponed the New Year to autumn, to September 1. (Is it not since then that the tradition has been to start the school year on this day?).

The second reformer of the calendar was Peter I, who ordered to switch to a civil account of years and instead of January 1, 7209 from the creation of the world, write January 1, 1700 from the birth of Christ. At the same time, the beginning of the year was moved to January. However, not wanting conflicts with the adherents of antiquity and the church, the tsar made a reservation in the decree: "And if anyone wants to write both those years, from the creation of the world and from the birth of Christ, in a row freely."

Ethnographers encountered a strange phenomenon when, after the October Revolution, they began to study the life of the peoples of the North. They were amazed that the Chukchi could not answer the question "how old are you?". And not because they did not know how to count, but simply because they thought the question was meaningless. Does it really matter how many years have passed since you were born, if you are a good hunter, if you are strong and brave and can always feed your family?

“The countdown was incomprehensible to them, and this was not due to a lack of memory,” writes Professor L.N. Gumilyov. “The time of making a thing and its relationship to life events was very clear. They ignored time as such, as an abstraction.”

"People," the scientist continues, "count time as they need, and do not use other counting systems, not because they do not know how, but because they do not see the practical meaning."

What is the " practical sense"chronology? In relations - economic and political. Within a single family, between families within a community, between communities within a state and between states.

When did chronology originate? Apparently, only with the formation of the state. And this chronology was not at all the sequential counting of years familiar to us. The ascension "to the helm of power" of the next ruler was a very solemn date, no wonder that it became the "reference point". So the chronology "from the birth of Christ" played the role of a scale that unites facts from the history of different peoples of the planet.

On the threshold of a new millennium

There is a belief that a leap year is unlucky. A person considers unsuccessful that which does not suit him. In winter, a lot of snow fell - good for the future harvest. In the spring, the water in the river rose high - bad ...

Recall. A leap year is calculated using a simple algorithm: if the digit of the year is divisible by 4, but not evenly divisible by 100, it is a leap year. The algorithm leads to an error every 400 years. Thus, 2000 is a special leap year.

One of the problems that we inherited from the outgoing millennium is the problem of the year 2000. In the early days of shells, 20th-century priests saved two decimal places in the utility operating system the current representation of the date. Legend has it that they did it out of good intentions.

"The road to the kingdom of Hades is paved with good intentions" and modern pontiffs began to inflate the problem of the year 2000, as in ancient times they provoked an underground trade in marcedonius days. This was facilitated by the common belief that a computer can do everything. The problem is that he can't think.

AT modern world Information Technology occupy more and more space. Not knowing the basics is a common mistake: few people are ready to admit even to themselves that they don’t understand something in what is happening in such close proximity. Thus, without realizing it, he joins the slender ranks of consumers of one of the many puzzles of the pontiffs since the beginning of 1991, but that's another story.