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Re: I Should've Been Asleep Two Hours Ago...

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Sunday, April 25, 2004, 16:28
On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 05:36:59PM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> It seems to me it would be inconvenient for trade and diplomacy if you > could not know what date it was in the next city.
But this situation was common in ancient times when adjacent city-states might not even use the same basic calendar system. As long as a correspondence between the two systems can be established in, er, correspondence, each side can keep records in its own system and it's only a minor inconvenience. When both sides use the same system but disagree on the particulars, it can be confusing, but in the case of the Islamic calendar, as I said, it never amounted to more than a day or so and was tantamount to time zone differences. The Islamic situation is, in terms of magnitude, much less of a problem than, for instance, that in Europe during the century and a half when most of the Continent had adopted the Gregorian reform but England was still on the Julian calendar. An Englishman corresponding to a Frenchman would write e.g. February 3, 1678 for the date his correspondent regarded as February 13, 1679. There is today still no central authority for observation of the new Islamic month, by the way, but it's less important since the calendar is no longer used for civil purposes, and for religious purposes the important date is the one local to the location of the observance (the annual Haaj pilgrimage is governed by the calendar according to the authorities in Mecca, for instance, no matter the date in a given pilgrim's locale of origin). -Mark