Re: WHAT calendar for the current year 2012

On Jan 29, 2008 9:26 AM, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:

> Yes, I know that.

Didn't mean to imply otherwise.  Sorry, I thought we'd outgrown the
inability to make declarative statements without impugning the knowledge of
one's interlocutor...  :)

I am not aware of any actual positive evidence that the Romans
> did have a 10 month calendar.

The chief argument is probably the month names, but I seem to recall that
there is more concrete evidence.  However, the only respectable source I
have in my possession is a brief article in the back of the Oxford Companion
to the Year, and that's at home.


> BTW I am not over-impressed by the Wikipedia article

Now *there's* a declarative statement that one hardly needs to bother
making. :)


> > and that'd be the Greeks who came up with that calendar.
>
> I doubt it. [...] the Latins themselves must surely have had a method of
> calculating times and seasons before ever they came under either Etruscan or
> Greek influence.

I'm sure they did. And the use of alternating 29/30 day months and
occasional intercalated extra months was invented independently many times
all over the world.  But I seem to recall that there was something about the
larger structure of the Republican calendar - the choice of month names, or
the odd idea of putting the extra month *inside* one of the other months, or
the particular timing of the new year; I don't recall the details - that
came from the Greeks (possibly via the Etruscans).  I could be entirely
mistaken, of course.

In any case, the various versions of the ancient Greek calendar (each
> city state seems to have done their own version) is remarkably similar in
> principle to the Jewish calendar.

... which almost certainly came from the Babylonians, along with a great
deal of other cultural attributes we traditionally associate with the Jews.

It seems to have been common to the Levant


The Levant?  That's not a term I'm familiar with.


> > I swear the Romans didn't have an original bone in their collective
> body. :)
> That I do not agree with.

Nor do I; it was only a joke.  Sorry if I offended.


> Also it appears that intercalation was carried out by various Pontifices
> Maximi in a haphazard and politically motivated way during the century of
> civil wars that followed the Punic wars. The thing was a complete mess by
> Caesar's time.

In particular there were no intercalations at all in the last few years (the
so-called "Years of Confusion") before he instituted his new calendar.

And then there were too many for the next 30+ years, as they had a leap year
every third year instead of every fourth, which wasn't corrected until
Augustus's time.

Calendars are a lot easier when you don't try to keep them in synch with
astronomical events... :)

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>