SOURCE: “The Persistence of a Relic” and “Astronomical Facts and Human Failings,” in The World's Work and the Calendar, Richard G. Badger, 1933, pp. 11-16, 22-32.

[In the following excerpt, Stiles explores the difficulty of measuring time and the origins of the calendar.]

THE PERSISTENCE OF A RELIC

Does it not seem strange that whereas our civilization has established fixed systems for computing the three dimensions of Space and the force of Gravity, it has failed to provide for ordinary use a fixed system for computing Time? Why has the application of good sense to Time measurement been neglected in the progress of human affairs?

Only astronomers compute Time in a rational manner. They have a number for every day in an era of nearly 8000 years. Thus they keep the reckoning of celestial events. They disdain the use of the constantly changing system of months and weeks employed for the every day affairs of humanity. It is much too complicated for astronomers. Long since, having succeeded in determining the particular measures of Time in which they were most interested, the day and the year, astronomers have been content to let the ordinary world have its unenlightened ultra-conservative way with the other measures.

Let a few examples of the difference between our methods of computing Space and Gravitation and our ordinary manner of computing Time speak for themselves of this strange situation.

We insist that in terms of length that

100 centimeters = 1 meter always
3 feet, 36 inches = 1 yard always

We insist that in terms of mass that

1000 grams = 1 kilogram always
16 ounces, avoirdupois = 1 pound always

Then, too, in terms of monetary value, we insist that

100 cents = 1 dollar always
20 shillings = 1 pound always

But in terms of Time we have been willing that

31 days	=	1 month sometimes
30 days	=	1 month sometimes
29 days	=	1 month sometimes
28 days	=	1 month sometimes
90 days	=	1 trimester sometimes
91 days	=	1 trimester sometimes
92 days	=	1 trimester sometimes
181 days	=	1 half year sometimes
184 days	=	1 half year sometimes
4 weeks	=	1 month only once in a while
13 weeks	=	1 trimester once in every 4
52 weeks	=	1 year never

Suppose shopkeepers sold cloth by yards sometimes required to be 36 inches in length, at other times 35 or 37.

Suppose our banker gave us in change sometimes 4, sometimes 4 and a fraction quarters for our dollars. How confusing our fiscal reckoning would quickly become.

It is true that in the beginning, measures of weight, distance, area and volume were easily fixed. Objective standards were available. Three kernels of corn became an inch. From the elbow to the end of the middle finger became a cubit. Measures of Time on the other hand were difficult to determine. In their nature they could not be objective; they were mental concepts. They were naturally marked by noticeable astronomical events. Priests and wise men did the best they could and at length certain so-called measures, the month and the week, then the seasons and the year were established. The month was an approximate measure of recurring new moons every 29 or 30 days. The week roughly marked the moon's quartering every 7 or 8 days. The latter two were in the beginning time-measures of the nomad, the hunter, and the herdsman. The seasons and the year were measures which were not needed until humanity took up agriculture.

The year is the cycle of time which embraces the return of the seasons. To ascertain the exact number of days comprised in this cycle and adjust a calendar thereto was a problem which baffled and defied the greatest minds of all humanity for hundreds of centuries. Its solution was never attained until the Gregorian calendar reform in 1582 establishing the calendar on a year of 365.24 days, with a leap year rule suppressing 3 century leap years in 400 years. It has been shown that this rule, if applied to past milleniums, gives calendar years which never differ on the average from solar years by more than plus or minus one day from 9000 b. c. to the present time.

Thus, in time, the calendar year was perfected but the month became a varying measure, and the week, while it evolved into a fixed standard in itself through religious use, never was an integral part of either the month or the year, and never has had a fixed relation to one or the other. It is an independent procession of a repeating group of seven names for days. Although the ability to devise a fixed system of time measurement has been its possession for several centuries, nevertheless, civilization has complacently continued with the haphazard development of the ancients which has come down to us as our present calendar.

This submission of progressively enlightened generations to a primitive method of time reckoning is an anomaly whose persistence can be accounted for by only one thing—the powerful force of habit without a need strong enough to break it.

Undoubtedly were we now confronted for the first time with the problem of constructing a calendar the present arrangement of months and weeks could never secure adoption. It would simply be regarded as silly. Undoubtedly, too, if the ancients had been able to establish fixed measures of time as easily as they were able to establish the cubit, the parasang and the drachma, we would have had a rational calendar. Doubtless there would have been several of them, just as different peoples have had different systems of weights and measures and still do, but in any case such a measure as a month would have always equalled a month just as a mile always equals a mile and a kilometer a kilometer. It was not the fault of the ancients; the cosmic nature of things was against them in the first place, and their limited knowledge of these things in the second.

With the advance of learning certain helpful changes were made from time to time, in which the force of habit was conquered by a need. But it happened that these changes were directed to remove the most troublesome defect, which was in the length of the calendar year. The first generally established improvement of this measure was the Julian solar year of the Roman Empire which began with 45 b. c. by command of a great calendar reformer, Julius Caesar. The impelling need at that time was for a correct measure of the agricultural seasons. The Julian year of 365.25 days was a close approximation. The final solution of that problem, as already mentioned, was the nearly perfect calendar year of Catholic Christendom established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 a. d. from which our present calendar gets its name. The need in this case was partly religious, arising from the failure under the Julian reckoning of the rule for determining the date of Easter. But in neither the Julian nor Gregorian reform was any attempt made to establish a uniform month, and in neither case, although the week was not in general use at the time of the Julian reform, was any attempt made to coordinate the week with the month or the year.

The months prior to the time of the Julian change, variable as they already were, suffered further variations in the process of lengthening them to fill out the newly established year. They are still with us in the same form, one of 28 or 29 days, others of 30 days, others of 31. The week subsequently crept into general use as the joint product of Egyptian astrology and Jewish-Christian religious custom. It is still with us as an aliquot part of no other time measure and a double confuser of dates as it cycles through the months and the years, giving different day-names to the same dates of the months and a different day-name each year to every date.

The persistence of these two time measures during nearly 2000 years of civilized progress has no parallel in the case of any other device or custom of ancient times. No wonder that they have been regarded almost as a part of the unalterable order of nature.

It is easy to see that while the centuries passed no pressing need could have been felt for the reform of either the month or the week. The historical fact of the matter is that they served well enough for the shorter reckonings of a civilization which for the greater part of these 20 centuries found that fixity and exactness only in the measures of the year and the seasons were essential to its progress.

That fact explains the persistence of the two shorter measures in their ancient form. Progress was bound up in agriculture, and agriculture, to be successful, needed to know in advance exactly when the seasons would recur. The month and the week were not necessary for that purpose. They existed merely as casual inheritances from humanity's nomad existence. Arranged in calendar tables, they served for dating and the observance of religious days and social events, but their utility for the purposes of agriculture was of little account. Since the year and the seasons were being accurately tallied, the month and the week, awkward as they were, provoked no great need of reform. The farmer's almanac was more important than the civil and social calendar, as it still is in countries of Asia and Africa.

Not that there did not live during the latter centuries of this era those who were irked by the civil and social inconveniences arising from the month and the week, and who sought their improvement as a practical and logical recourse. These reformists were impressed by the superior dating utility of a calendar of a single pattern, instead of one that actually produces 14 different patterns year by year, has 28 varieties of months in disposition of week-days, and requires 28 years to complete the cycle of the changes. For such is the combined effect of the unequal months and the incommensurability of the year and the month with the week. The 18th and 19th centuries saw numerous proposals for an unchanging calendar but the need was not great enough to overcome the force of inveterate usage. Thus the relic has persisted.

.....

ASTRONOMICAL FACTS AND HUMAN FAILINGS

Man's inescapable difficulty in trying to make a suitable calendar is that the celestial cogwheels do not function in terms of his conception of mathematical simplicity.

Take the sun, the earth and the moon. Calendar making would be very simple if the year could be shortened or the day lengthened so that the time required for the earth to make its journey around the sun were, say, exactly 364 days, and if the moon were so obliging as to hurry up a bit and make her journey around the earth in exactly 28 days. We should then have no difficulties with the calendar. The year would have 364 days, with 13 lunar months of four 7-day weeks corresponding exactly to the moon's four phases, all neatly fitting the mathematical scheme of exact multiple and quotient which simplicity demands and our minds find easy to use.

But in neither case is the orbit completed in an integral number of turns of the earth on its axis. Our solar year consists of 365 days plus the decimal fraction.2422, and our moon month of 29 days, plus the decimal fraction .53 and we cannot help it.

This baffling non-conformity of the cosmic timepieces with man's human notion of simplicity has taxed his ingenuity since the beginning in his efforts to construct calendars. The task has been further complicated by his religious prejudices, by taboos and superstitions, by the pride of autocrats and by the petrifying effect of custom. Even today certain dogmatic theologies and certain superstitions combine with sentiment and conservatism to antagonize proposals for changes which advanced knowledge, reason and common sense alike show will be beneficial. Let us tell the remarkable story of this struggle between astronomical facts and human failings that has marked the development of our calendar, and then set down exactly what so far has been accomplished.

The day, comparatively easy to measure, was our first calendrical time unit. The impressive phenomena of the moon provided the next, which was the month. We were hunters, nomads and herdsmen then. We did little in the line of agriculture. We were not concerned about the correct date of the return of the seasons, for we did not need to reckon for crop planting. We left it to the birds, the foliage, the lengthening, or darkening twilight and the weather to tell us of the advent of a new season. Although we discovered that 12 moons were not enough and 13 moons were too many to measure the repetition of these changes in nature, we were not upset about it. We were a bit more concerned because a complete lunation did not exactly coincide with a whole number of days. Neither did the quarterings of the moon. That was an exasperating puzzle, but we had to make the best of it.

So in reckoning by our moon months we made them 29 and 30 or 29 and 31 days in length alternately. It seemed easiest to call the interval between moon phases seven days, although some intervals were eight days. Some of us worshipped the moon as a deity benevolent to the night-wandering nomad and the hunter, and we celebrated the new moon with religious feasts. Work was taboo on these moondays lest the deity be offended with our selfishness.

All our first calendars were lunar. Our priests had charge of them. They reckoned by actual sightings of the new moon. Sometimes on cloudy nights the priests would miss a new moon and get sadly mixed in their calculations. Some Mohammedan tribes to this day reckon their months by actual sightings of the new moon.

At length many of us came to abandon our nomad ways and to settle down on the land. We began to cultivate wheat and barley. And in changing to the agricultural life the matter of knowing just when the seasons would begin became for the first time important. We began to think the changes of the sun of more consequence than those of the moon. Our moon reckonings did not serve for seed planting. Then the religious allegiance of those of us who became tillers of the soil changed to the orb that seemed benevolent to our crops. We propitiated the Sun-God and sought to find an exact measure of his seasons.

The first agricultural nation arose in the fertile plain of the Nile. Its people became worshippers of the sun. To this agricultural people it was a matter of life and death to know exactly when to plant their crops, and to have that information in advance in order to prepare. For this need a moon calendar was a misleading guide. And so, with the shadows and angles of their many pyramids, built perhaps for the very purpose, and by sighting the heliacal risings of the fixed stars, the Egyptian priests experimented and at length discovered, with relative accuracy, the true length of the solar year. Then they constructed a new kind of calendar, a solar calendar. They regulated the moon months so that each should contain 30 days. Four of them made an Egyptian season—Flood time, Seed Time and Harvest time. Twelve such months made 360 days and to complete the 365 day year they appended to their calendar five festival holidays. They left the excess fraction of a day to accumulate but secretly kept account of it.

This first solar calendar was in use by the Egyptians at least 3000 years before Christ. Late in the first century b. c. a leap year rule was put into effect to take care of the excess fraction. In this form the old Egyptian calendar is still in use in Abyssinia and in the Coptic Church, the native Christian church of modern Egypt.

In America, sun-worshipping, pyramid-building Mayans also solved the puzzle of the year and constructed a solar calendar, two milleniums perhaps before the Spanish conquerors destroyed their civilization. They also did not bother with the excess fraction.

The other nations, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Jews, and the early Romans struggled with their inadequate moon calendars, while Egypt rose to be a mighty power, and the granary of the Mediterranean nations. Scientific knowledge spread slowly in those days. Moreover, the Egyptian priests kept the secret of their discovery because in being able to announce the seasons, they had in their hands a mighty weapon.

At length Egypt was subdued by the military Romans and the great Caesar came upon the scene. At that time the Roman moon calendar was in hopeless confusion. It had been given to Rome by Romulus when he founded the city, history tells us, in 753 b. c., elaborated by him, no doubt, from cruder and still more ancient patterns in use by neighboring tribes. From this calendar our own present calendar is a lineal descendant. Let us pay some attention to it.

Romulus provided for only ten months of 29 or 31 days each. They summed up to 304 days. These months were all numbered. Four of the numbers have come down to us in the familiar but anomalous names, September, October, November and December. An effort was apparently made by Romulus to have a year and to begin it with the spring season. The Roman herdsman had become agricultural. History indicates that the first month started near the vernal equinox. Gradually the numbers of the first four months were replaced with names—the Latin for March, April, May and June. But a year of 10 such months could not possibly keep step with the seasons. Romulus may have inserted supplementary months, but it is definitely known that his successor, Numa Pompilius, added two new months to the year—February to end the year, and January to be the first month. He retained the scheme of 29 and 31 day months, apparently for luck, because odd numbers were considered lucky by the Romans, and produced a year of 355 days. These 355 days still failed to measure the solar year, whereupon Numa caused to be inserted every second year an intercalary month alternately of 22 and 23 days, placing it by inexplicable fancy between the 23rd and 24th of February instead of at the end of the month. On the average Numa's device gave the calendar about a day too much. Three hundred years later the Decemvirs made another effort to solve the problem, abolishing Numa's intercalary month, and giving the pontiffs discretion to insert when necessary a longer month called Mercedonius. At the same time they switched January and February around, doubtless in an effort of the moment to restore to March its familiar reputation as the month of the vernal equinox.

The Athenians, meantime, had learned from their astronomer Meton, that every 19 years the phases of the moon reproduce their positions in the solar year, and proceeded to regulate their moon calendar (432 B. C.) to this Metonic cycle by intercalating months at proper intervals. This scheme was at least systematic. The Roman pontiffs, however, had no system whatever, and did not seem to care. By Caesar's time their capricious management, not to mention frequent political abuses of their privilege, resulted in the natural date of the equinox falling in months reputedly belonging to the summer. The equinox was supposed to occur on the 25th day of March, but March had moved backward in the natural year. Unable to predict what the pontiffs might do, the bewildered Roman farmer could scarcely be sure from year to year whether he could count on March for January snowstorms or July drought. Imagine planning your summer vacation if we had that trouble now.

Caesar summoned Sosigines, an Alexandrian astronomer, to explain to him the Egyptian calendar. Then by imperial edict he established a fixed solar calendar for the Roman Empire. He abolished Mercedonius. Caesar did not, however, completely adopt the Egyptian scheme of 30 day months. That old Roman superstitution that odd numbers were lucky and even numbers unlucky stood in the way. He added enough extra days to the twelve Roman moon months to complete the 365 days of the solar year, arranged as many odd numbered months as possible, eight of them, and adopted a leap year rule devised by the Egyptians although apparently not yet in use by them. It gave to the natural year a value of 365[frac14] days and added an extra day to the calendar year every fourth year.

To restore the 25th day of March to the vernal equinox, the year 46 B. C. was made to contain a total of 445 days, and the first year of what we now call the Julian calendar began with January 1 45 b. c. Caesar assigned 31 days to alternate months beginning with January, the remaining having 30 days, except February which had 29 (in leap years 30). Thus eight of the months were “lucky.”

At this time six of the original ten months of King Romulus still bore their Latin numbers. To Quintilis (fifth) was given the name July in honor of Julius Caesar. It was his birth month and had the lucky 31 days. Two years later Caesar was assassinated.

“The divine Augustus,” his successor, required that a month in the calendar bear his name also, and thus Sextilis (sixth) was changed to August. He demanded, too, that since July had 31 days, so should August and accordingly transferred to it a day from February. This resulted in there being 90 days in the first quarter of the year and 93 in the third. The Roman landlords complained over this discrepancy, but Augustus declined to give up his 31 day month. His solution was to transfer the 31st day of September to October, reducing the third quarter to 92 days and increasing the fourth quarter to 92. His fancy was, also, to transfer the 31st day of November to the 31st day of December, doubtless to keep the odd and even sequence. That is the arrangement of the months and quarters which we still have, a monument to the god of luck and the vanity of two Roman autocrats. …

Caesar's calendar which we now call the Julian served humanity well for sixteen centuries, despite its unequal months, a leap year rule that proved faulty, and the fact that it lost its fixity. Caesar was responsible only for the first two defects. Loss of fixity was due to the gradual insinuation during the early centuries of the Christian era of that remarkable product of Egyptian astrology and Jewish religious custom—the 7-day week.

The history of the week should have a chapter for itself, but we shall note here that so gradually did this method of reckoning creep into the calendar that no date for its appearance can be assigned except in terms of centuries. The Jews had long used a 7-day period based on their Sabbath, a word which in Hebrew sometimes meant seven days and sometimes the seventh day. This week had no day names. The Egyptian astrologers unequal months and cycling weeks caused no difficulties of importance to a world whose economic life was still chiefly agricultural.

At length the fault in the Julian leap year rule, which added too many leap days, had to be corrected. It had caused the calendar to overlap the natural year by about 11 minutes on the average each year, and the date of the vernal equinox to recede ten days. The correction was made in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, after a century of ecclesiastical discussion in which kings and princes joined. Gregory established a more accurate leap year rule and omitted ten dates from the calendar to restore the date of the vernal equinox to March 21. This was required for the proper functioning of the Easter rule and to prevent in the course of time, as Dante had remarked in Paradiso, “that January be all unwintered by that hundredth part neglected upon earth.”

The dates omitted were those between October 4 and October 15, 1582. Caesar's rule for a leap year every four years was changed so that after 1600 the leap days of three centurial years in every four would be omitted, reducing the average error to an inconsequential fraction, at least for a millenium. Thereafter the calendar continued as before, even more efficient for agricultural and ecclesiastical use, but still defective as to its months and weeks with few people much concerned about it.

Religious prejudice caused non-Catholic nations long to ignore the Papal Bull by which Gregory decreed those wise and necessary adjustments in the reckoning of the year. The German and Dutch Protestant States and Denmark waited until 1700 before accepting them, the British until 1752, and Sweden until 1753. Russia and the Balkan States continued to use the Julian reckoning into the present century. Japan in 1873 made a complete change from her moon system to the Gregorian, China officially in 1912 and Turkey officially in 1917.

Such briefly is the story of humanity's prolonged struggle to construct a suitable calendar. We find that the only successful achievement thus far is the fixing of an accurate measure for the natural year. Its shorter divisions, the months and the week, remain a hodge podge of irregularity and variability.