The Calendar (41 page)

*This committee was convened at the request of the League of Nations, which organized a worldwide effort in 1928-29 to simplify the calendar, without success. The US committee was composed of dozens of prominent Americans, including Eastman, Henry Ford, Adolph Ochs, Gilbert Grosvenor and George P. Putnam.

Fixing the 25.96 second error is much simpler. Indeed, proposals have been made to slip in a
leap-millennium
rule, which would cancel out the Gregorian leap-century rule by eliminating a leap day on millennial years such as the year 2000. This would make the ‘modified’ Gregorian calendar accurate to within a day every 3,323 years. Undoubtedly, this fix will become official sometime in the next millenium, or the one after, if in fact the world is still using Gregory’s calendar.

As for the problem with no year zero, I know of no plans to make a correction: which at the very least would involve changing every history book dealing with dates before the year AD 1. In calendar circles new ideas come and go--with proposals floating around suggesting a new chronological system that would start with a year one according to formulas and at various moments in history.

Just the other day a calendar group on the Internet had a brief discussion that began by someone noting that the September equinox in 1997 would be the Year 6000 in the time line established by the Irish prelate and scholar James Ussher (1581-1656). He proposed that God created the world on 23 October 4004 BC. Another participant fired back that under the Byzantine calendar whatever that is--the year 7506 had just begun. ‘The reason it holds special interest for me is that it starts earlier than any other calendar I have seen,’ writes this calendar aficionado. ‘If we used that date, most of recorded history would have a positive date, and it would eliminate the need for BC.’

Another calendar list-server member replied:

‘A much simpler solution would be to just add 10,000 to the current year number. [Then] it would be very easy to observe that. e.g., in 2011 we will commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the run at Marathon.’ He also points out the ludicrous practice of a BC calendar that counts years backward, but starts each of these negative years on 1 January, after which they run forwards through the days and months as if they were on the ‘positive’ side of the BC/AD split.

This observation was followed by someone mentioning a calendar proposed several years ago called the Holocene Calendar that would use the end of the last ice age as its starting point, some 12,000 years ago. Which prompted a flurry of other responses and ideas in a debate that, at least in this small corner of cyberspace is not going away.

Meanwhile, as the caesium atoms in the master clock continue to oscillate, and the earth wobbles and slows ever so slightly, most of us carry on as people have since we first became aware of time--whether we live by the Gregorian, Holocene, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Nuer, Moslem or Goddess Lunar calendar. We take in stride a calendar used by most of the world that is flawed, but endures, largely because it works just fine for most of us, and it is what we are used to.

As I watched the red numbers flash past on the master clock in Building 78, I was out of time myself. My calendar for that date, 18 September said I needed to be uptown at an appointment at 11:30 am, in a mere 8,273,368,593,000,000,000,000 oscillations (or so) of caesium. That’s roughly 15 minutes in old-fashioned earth time. Though in any time, except perhaps Einstein’s warped time,

I was going to be late, which made me want to swear at the little square box in my date book so crammed with things to do that I was going to spend the whole day being late.

Which brought new meaning to the words of Sartre, who I think got it backward when he said, ‘But time is too large, it refuses to let itself be filled up.’

He was talking about clock time: the endless cycles of seconds, minutes and hours that go on and on. By contrast calendar time is all about those little boxes of days strung out one after another, all squeezed into a finite and artificial time span of our own making. After all it was we humans who invented this thing that is both a miraculous tool and a cage of finite moments that keep us forever running about, trying to make the best of the short time we have been allotted. At least those of us in the West who are more obsessed than anyone else with counting oscillations and cramming little boxes with things to do.

There are moments when I am hopelessly late, or cannot possibly fit anything else into my schedule, when I sigh and wish that Cro-Magnon man 13,000 years ago in the Dordogne Valley had set aside his eagle bone unfinished and had gone to bed. Or gone for a long walk under the Paleolithic sky. Or gone to play with his little Cro-Magnon children. Of course, this would have only delayed the inevitable as some other fur-clad hominid took up the task of carving notches and counting phases of the moon, launching humanity on its strange, epic quest.

And now I have to go, because I am out of time.

Bibliographical Note

I wrote this book as a storyteller fascinated by the unusual and unexpected tale of how the calendar used by most of the world came to be. I make no claims to scholarly expertise in the far-ranging fields of time reckoning, astronomy, mathematics, the philosophy of time, theology or history. I have done my best to meticulously and accurately research what was necessary in each of these fields to write this story. I have consulted with experts who generously gave their time and generally agreed with my interpretations, or helped me to correct them. Obviously any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own.

The following are highlights of sources used in writing this book. I conservatively consulted many hundreds of sources, both primary and secondary. On general historic topics I tended to consult a number of secondary sources, checking them against one another, and asking my expert readers to review the material. On calendar issues I used primary sources where possible. I worked extensively in the Library of Congress and visited and worked in the British Library in London and Vatican Library and archives in Rome. I found surprisingly few recent books written on the calendar, though an excellent and lively work on the history and meaning of time was recently published by the astroarchaeologist Anthony

E.     Aveni, called
Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures
(Kodansha International, 1995)-I also found particularly helpful J.T. Fraser’s
Time: The Familiar Stranger
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Margo Westrheim’s thin but highly informative volume
Calendars of the World
(Oneworld, 1993); and P.W. Wilson’s classic
The Romance of the Calendar
(Norton, 1937). Also
The Book of Calendars,
ed. by Frank Parise (Facts on File, 1982).

Most indispensable of all the general works was a paperbound collection of essays I happened to find at the Vatican bookstore in Rome:
Gregorian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to Commemorate Its 400th Anniversary 1582-1982,
edited by G.V. Coyne, M.A. Hoskin and O. Pedersen (Specola Vaticana, 1983). This collection includes offerings from calendar experts from around the world who detail all aspects of the Gregorian reform, the history of the Catholic ecclesiastic calendar, the reaction to the 1582 reform and the current status of the calendar.

For ideas and general information on the history of time and science I consulted Daniel J. Boorstin’s
The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself
(Vintage, 1983) and an assortment of encyclopedias:
The World Book Encyclopedia
(1995);
The New Catholic Encyclopedia
(1967);
A History of Technology,
ed. by C. Singer,
et al.
(Clarendon Press, 1954); and the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
ed. by C.C. Gillispie (1970-1980). Atlases and general historic works include Norman Davies’s
Europe: A History
(Oxford University Press, 1996); Colin McEvedy’s
The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History
(1967) and
The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History
(1969); and
The Times Concise Atlas of World History,
ed. by Geoffrey Barraclough (Hammond, 1982). And the indispensable

Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary’ (1983); Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary (1984); and Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1972).

Internet sites included the New Advent Catholic Supersite,
http://wunv.knight.org/advent/cathen/’,
CalendarLand,
http://website-.juneau.com/honie/janice/calendarland/,
a general information site on calendars past and present from around the world; and Britannica Online,
http://unvw.eb.com/.
I also used numerous sites on topics ranging from mathematics to descriptions of cities and countries; and the philosophy of time to the Black Plague.

On early calendars and societies I used Aveni’s
Empires of Time;
Alexander Marshack’s classic:
The Roots of Civilization
(McGraw-Hill, 1972); Dr Marshack also was kind enough to send me a number of articles updating his work. I consulted Michael Coe’s
The Maya
(Thames and Hudson, 1993); John Phelps,
The Prehistoric Solor Calendar
(Johns Hopkins Press, 1955);
Archaeoastronomy in the New World,
ed. by Anthony Aveni (Cambridge University Press, 1982); G.S. Hawkins,
Stonehenge Decoded
(Delta Dell, 1965), and C. Chippindale,
Stonehenge Complete
(Cornell University Press, 1983)

On the general history of science, time and the calendar: Arno Borst,
The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer
(Polity Press, 1993) and
Ancient Inventions,
ed. by Peter James and Nick Thorpe (Ballantine Books, 1994). Also Gerhard Hohrn-van Rossum,
History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders,
trans. by Thomas Dunlap (University of Chicago Press, 1996). On philosophy,
A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston (Doubleday, New York, 1985).

On the history of astronomy, I drew on A. Pannekoek,
A Flistory of Astronomy
(Dover, New York, 1961); Hugh Thurston,
Early Astronomy
(Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994); and
The Cambridge

Illustrated Histor)’ of Astronomy, ed. by Michael Hoskin (1997). For ancient Alexandria I consulted Kenneth Heuer,

City of Stargazers
(Scribner’s, 1972). On general astronomy, Fred L. Whipple,
Orbiting the Sun, Planets and Satellites of the Solar System
(Harvard University Press, 1981) and Jean Meeus,
Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon and Planets
(Willmann-Bell, Richmond, Virginia, 1983). Also by Jean Meeus and Denis Savoie, ‘The History of the Tropical Year’,
Journal British Astronomical Association,
102, 1, 1992: 40--2. On the history of mathematics, Carl B. Boyer,
A Histor)’ of Mathematics
(John Wiley & Sons, 1991) and G.G. Joseph,
The Crest of the Peacock
(Penguin, 1992). On the science of time, Paul Davies,
About Time, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution
(Touchstone, 1995) and Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
(Bantam, 1988).

For the Roman calendar I used Agnes Kirsopp Michels’
The Calendar of the Roman Republic
(Princeton University Press, 1967); Van Johnson,
The Roman Origins of Our Calendar
(American Classical League, 1974); and Carole E. Newlands,
Playing with Time, Ovid and the Fasti
(Cornell University Press, 1995). On general Roman history, Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;
J.B. Bury,
History of the Later Roman Empire
(Dover, 1958); and
The Cambridge Ancient History,
vol. IX, ed. by J.A. Crook,
et al.
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).

On general medieval and Renaissance history I used Norman F. Cantor,
The Civilization of the Middle Ages
(HarperPerennial, 1993); Maurice Keen,
The Pelican History of Medieval Europe
(Penguin, 1988); and Eugene F. Rice, Jr.,
The Foundations of Early Modern Europe,
1460--1559 (Norton, 1970). On science in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
Science in the Middle Ages,
ed. by David C. Lindberg (University of Chicago Press, 1978); Edward Grant,
The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Alfred W. Crosby,
The Measure of Reality:

Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Church in the Middle Ages I used Margaret Deanesly,

A History of the Medieval Church,
590--1500 (Methuen & Co, 1969). I also used Jacques Le Goff,
Intellectuals in the Middle Ages,
trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Blackwell, 1994) and Le Goff’s
Medieval Civilization, 400-1300,
trans. by Julia Barrow (Blackwell, 1995). For primary sources I used the truly phenomenal ‘Internet Medieval Sourcebook’, out of Fordham University, at
http://unvw.fordhan1.edu/halsall/sbook2.html,
which includes extensive offerings of complete and often hard to find original texts.

For India I consulted Romila Thapar,
A History of India
(Penguin Books, 1977); for the history of Islam and the Arab empire, Philip K. Hitti,
The Arabs, A Short History
(Regency Publishing, 1996). On the Moslem calendar I read G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville,
The Muslim and Christian Calendars
(Oxford University Press, 1963).

The Gregorian reform itself is cited in exhaustive detail in a number of sources already mentioned. I also used a number of primary sources, including the original bull issued by Gregory XIII, the
Compendium Novae Rationis Restituendi Kalendarium
issued by the pope’s calendar commission, and other documents housed in the Vatican archives and in other libraries. I drew heavily from the
Gregorian Reform of the Calendar,
cited above.