It seems like everything we do is controlled by a calendar. Appointments, classes, meetings, and services are all events we have to make time for. You likely use some type of scheduling tool, and that’s wise — especially if you are in school, have kids, or your work requires more than merely showing up and heading home. Being on time is incredibly important, but keeping a schedule didn’t always look like it does now. In fact, for most of history, a Calendar and schedule looked significantly different — especially before the invention of the calendar. Keep reading for some fun facts about timekeeping throughout the world’s history.
1. The First Measuring of Time Appeared in 2700 B.C.
Keeping track of time is a very complex task, and calendars weren’t created overnight. The calendar as we know it today started as an underdeveloped, essential measurement of time produced by the Sumerians in 2700 B.C. This is regarded as crude and not quite an accurate calendar regarding technical requirements, but it laid the foundations for the excellence we can take advantage of today.
There wasn’t much detail surrounding this first attempt at keeping time. Sumerian scribes derived a system to measure agricultural cycles and governmental terms. This way, they would know when to harvest, plant new crops, and keep their administrative intervals accurate.
However, since this was a basic time measurement unit, it didn’t stay relevant for long. By 2400 B.C., Sumerians had stepped up their game to devise a pseudo-monthly calendar. This set up 12 periods of 30 days, reflecting our modern 30-day months and 12-months-a-year system. They loved this, and it was a great system because it followed the moon cycles, which followed harvest schedules.
2. Over a Week Disappeared in 1582
Starting in 46 B.C., Roman Emperor Julius Caesar implemented the creation of a new calendar — the Julian calendar. It was more accurate than the previously used Roman calendar, but it was still riddled with issues. The most drastic error in the Julian calendar was its overestimation of a solar year’s length. In practice, this resulted in drifting days every 300 or so years.
This might not seem like a big deal, but it interfered with the dates of Christian holidays. Specifically, Easter was the most difficult to calculate under the Julian calendar. In 325 A.D., the Council of Nicaea declared Easter would be celebrated “the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.” At the time, the vernal equinox fell on March 21, but as the flawed calendar continued, it became harder to calculate Easter.
To fix this growing problem, the 1562-3 Council of Trent voted for a new calendar to be created. After about 19 years of astronomy and mathematics, Pope Gregory XIII officially established the Gregorian calendar (the one we still use today). However, the switch was not smooth sailing by any means. With the solar year more accurately calculated, 10 days needed to be eliminated to get the vernal equinox back on track. The result was a jump from October 4 to October 15 in the year 1582. Additionally, it would take up to 200 years for all of Europe to adopt the Gregorian calendar, so time varied from country to country.
3. Leap Days Have Been Used Since 300 B.C.
Under our modern calendar system, a “leap day” is added to the end of February every four years. This is because a solar year — how long the Earth takes to orbit around the Sun — is measured as 365.2422 days long. The .2422 is then rounded to .25, or one-fourth, which results in one extra day after four years. This practice is extremely familiar to any living person, but it wasn’t always that way.
As mentioned before, the first calendars were very rough and inaccurate, but they were a good starting point. There were also differences in how time was measured from region to region, especially regarding measuring based on the sun or moon. Ancient Egypt had typically used a lunar calendar, but in the 3rd century B.C., they switched to observing a solar year. They had very accurately calculated the length to be 365 days, but the one-fourth day was still missing.
Seemingly ahead of their time, Ancient Egyptians wanted to fix their solar calendar and thus invented the leap day. They implemented this once every four years, just like we do today. The Romans observed how this bettered time measurement and adopted it, and the Western world followed shortly after.
4. Russia Used the Julian Calendar until 1918
If you had a thorough history curriculum at school, then you’ve probably learned about the 20th-century revolutions in Russia. These communist revolutions were first led by Vladimir Lenin, who was inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx. His followers successfully overthrew the Russian government and created the Soviet Union in a coup known as the October Revolution.
Pre-Soviet Russia was considered backward and behind the times—this is a matter of opinion, of course, but in terms of the calendar system, it was true. This is why the October Revolution actually happened in November, according to the modern Gregorian calendar. Pre-Soviet Russia had recorded the event as October 24 and 25, but to the outside world, it was November 6 and 7.
However, with the Soviets’ new rule in place, many changes were made beyond the governmental and economic structure. Only a few months after the revolution, the Julian calendar was forsaken for the Gregorian calendar. On February 1, 1918, citizens ‘jumped forward’ in time to February 14 to match the Western world. Russians experienced the same missing days that were felt 300 years prior during the incident of 1582.
5. The Names of the Months are Off
Most languages in Western civilization are Latin-based, meaning they are some derivative of the Latin vocabulary. This is why many European languages have similarities — for example, the word for “house” is the same in both Spanish and Italian. There are also Latin terms we continue to use today, like “status quo,” “carpe diem,” and “et cetera.” Consequently, we still use many names the Romans coined, like the names of the months.
Every month was named with some kind of meaning behind it, like June is for the goddess Juno, and March is for the god Mars. The last four months — September, October, November, and December — have numerical meanings.
- September – seventh month
- October – eighth month
- November – ninth month
- December – tenth month
Each prefix gives the name its numerical value. This is logical, but you’ve probably noticed that these numbers don’t match the month. For example, September is the ninth month, and December is the twelfth. This “oopsie’” is actually not an oopsie at all, or at least it wasn’t originally.
The year used to begin with March, and January and February didn’t exist. The Romans operated with a 10-month calendar, leaving a whopping 60 days of the solar year unaccounted for. To fix this issue, ruler Numa Pompilius created the months of January and February around 700 B.C. When these two were placed at the beginning of the year, it shifted the other ten down, throwing the numerically named off.
The Calendar is Ever-Changing
There have been lots of changes in how we measure and track time throughout history, and this isn’t stopping anytime soon. The digital age has only made this process of change speed up, with the progression of inventions becoming more rapid. Calendars have not been excluded from all these changes, either — think about how many features online calendars have. And one day in the future, the Gregorian calendar may be swapped for another, more accurate system. But until then, it’s fun to learn facts and oddities about what led us to where we are today.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Andrea Imre; Pexels
Deanna Ritchie
Editor-in-Chief at Calendar. Former Editor-in-Chief and writer at Startup Grind. Freelance editor at Entrepreneur.com. Deanna loves to help build startups, and guide them to discover the business value of their online content and social media marketing.