Re: Calendar changes

Nik Taylor wrote:

> The ancient Egyptians had something like your extra 5/6 days.  IIRC,
> they had 12 months of 30 days, and then five feast days at the end of
> the year.  I don't know how they handled leap years.  I know they
> must've, because the year was set up so that the first day of the year
> was determined by the star Sirius (the brightest star in the sky).
Actually, they didn't, and their calendar went slowly out of whack.
The introduction of the leap year was a Greek idea, which the Romans
adopted but the Egyptians, a conservative lot, did not.

The Egyptian calendar is interesting for being the first known purely
solar calendar, with no lunar component to it.  In Egypt, the moon
didn't matter that much: what mattered was the annual flooding of the
Nile.

> I
> don't know if they had weeks.
Not as far as anyone knows.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)