The History Of The Calendar

By Author: Robert Deans
Total Articles: 246
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The movements of the earth, moon and sun schedule how we live, and from these movements a calendar is formed in order to offer structure and organisation to society. As humans grow in understanding the format of a calendar has progressed, meaning the calendar has history dating back to numerous years.

The universally accepted calendar nowadays is the Gregorian calendar. This has been widely used for hundreds of years, and in today's world we count a lot on physical formations from the calendar in order to arrange our lives. Many calendar companies even provide personalised calendars or personalised diaries. These calendars may abide by a standard organisation of the months and years, but they allow us to feel that there's something individual in the manner by which we organise our way of life.

The Gregorian calendar that we abide by was named after its founder, Pope Gregory XIII, and came into use in 1582. The Gregorian calendar was much like its predecessor, the Julian calendar, which had been created by Julius Caesar in 46BC.

Before the Julian calendar, most of the earth lived ...
... by the Roman calendar. The Roman calendar uses lunar phases (the phases of the moon), and is still used today in several forms, by a small number of nations. The Islamic, or Hijri calendar, always includes twelve lunar months, however the Chinese, Hebrew, and Hindu lunar calendars are slightly different; because a year cannot be split equally into an exact amount of lunar phases, every two or three years their is a thirteenth month.

Within the Roman times there was alot of superstition about the months in a calendar. The months in the Roman calendar were made of either 29 or 30 days. 29-day months were referred to as ‘hollow' months, whilst 30-day months were identified as ‘full' months. Full months were considered to be powerful and prosperous, whilst hollow months were regarded as unlucky. Most of this superstition has now been lost, any left is generally surrounding Friday the 13th, thankfully it doesn't come round any more than two times in any full calendar . If we continued to live believing the Romans superstitions, it would be unlikely that anyone would own a personalised calendar, as a consequence of Romans considering them to be a bad omen.

When the Gregorian calendar was officially announced, on October 4, 1582, the date suddenly became October 15. This was the method used in an effort to correct the way the Julian calendar had addressed leap years. The Julian calendar simply consisted of a leap year, one in every four, which may be translated to mean the calendar year averaged 365.25 days. The real calendar year is in fact about 365.242189 days, that disparity induced an error of around 0.75 days each century. The Gregorian calendar has kept to the practise of a leap year each four years, with the exception of every century we skip one, and every four centuries we have one.

Unfortunately, while preparing the switch from Julian to Gregorian, an error was made when determining the dates, and when switching calendars twelve days ought to have been lost, rather than ten. Which means that our current calendar continues to have an error of three days every 10,000 years, meaning that another change to our calendar system could eventually need to be made.

For a few nations, following the introduction of the Gregorian calendar some persisted to use the Julian calendar and it was 1918 it finally disappeared from use. Most Catholic nations switched to the Gregorian calendar simultaneously, some Protestant nations took much longer. After 300 years from the Gregorian calendar being introduced the USSR was the last nation to switch in 1918.

The calendar has travelled in leaps and bounds since humans started to monitor the days, months and years; from using sundials and water clocks to map time, to having personalised calendars and personalised diaries with your own pictures and quotes on. And irrespective of everything humans have learnt, the calendar we follow is still inaccurate. The calendar is an incomplete history, and we'll just have to wait for the next change to it and our lives.

This article was written by R. Deans on behalf of i Name It, experts in personalised calendars and personalised diaries. For more info on personalised calendars and personalised diaries please visit iNameIt.co.uk