The Calendar - A History
The movements of the earth, moon and sun schedule our lives, and from these motions a calendar is formed as a way to present structure and organisation to society. As humans gain in understanding the format of a calendar has evolved, meaning the calendar has history dating back to numerous years.
It's broadly acknowledged that the Gregorian calendar is the calendar used by today's society. This has been widely used for hundreds of years, and in today’s world we count a lot on physical formations in the calendar in order to organise our way of life. There are a variety of companies which offer personalised calendars or personalised diaries. But these calendars will adhere to the organisation identified within the Gregorian calendar with regards to the months of the year, a personalised calendar simply adds your own touch when people arrange their lives by the calendar months.
The Gregorian calendar was founded by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the name Gregorian originates from its founder. The Gregorian calendar is not that far removed from the Julian calendar, its predecessor started by Julius Caesar in 46BC.
Prior to the Julian calendar, much of the earth lived with the Roman calendar. The Roman calendar is based on lunar phases (the phases of the moon), which is still seen today in several forms, by a small number of nations. When it comes to different calendars you will see that the Islamic or the Hijri calendar incorporate twelve lunar months, this differs from the Chinese, Hebrew and Hindu calendars where every two or three years you will see a thirteenth month, this is often because each year isn't a perfect number of lunar phases.
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. A month containing 29 days was known as a 'hollow'month and one that contains 30 days was referred to as a 'full'month. Full months were regarded as being powerful and prosperous, whilst hollow months were considered to be unlucky. Thankfully, in today’s world, any superstition regarding the calendar is limited to Friday the 13th, a date which will never come more than twice a year. If we continued to live believing the Romans superstitions, it would be unlikely that anyone would own a personalised calendar, because of the Romans thinking of them to be a bad omen.
When the Gregorian calendar was formally announced, on October 4, 1582, the date all of a sudden became October 15. This was the strategy utilized in an attempt to fix the way the Julian calendar had handled leap years. The Julian calendar contained one leap year every four years, meaning that a calendar year averaged 365.25 days. The actual length of a calendar year is 365.242189 days, meaning there's a difference each century close to 0.75 days. The Gregorian calendar has kept to the practise of a leap year each four years, apart from every century we skip one, and every four centuries we have one.
Unfortunately, while preparing the switch from Julian to Gregorian, a mistake was made when calculating the dates, and when switching calendars twelve days ought to have been lost, as opposed to ten. Every 10,000 years there's a discrepency of three days, which suggests that one day another change could occur.
For a few nations, after the introduction of the Gregorian calendar some persisted to use the Julian calendar and it was 1918 that it finally disappeared from use. Whilst Catholic nations switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar promptly, it took Protestants a lot longer. After 300 years from the Gregorian calendar being introduced the USSR was the final nation to swap in 1918.
The calendar has travelled in leaps and bounds since humans begun to monitor the days, months and years; from using sundials and water clocks to map time, to using personalised calendars and personalised diaries with our own pictures and quotes on. Inspite of the changes through the years the calendar in use today continues to be technically incorrect. The calendar is an incomplete history, and we’ll just have to wait for the next change to it and our way of life.
This article was written by R. Deans on behalf of i Name It, experts in <a href="http://www.inameit.co.uk/">personalised calendars</a> and <a href="http://www.inameit.co.uk/product/8/personalised-diaries/?pCat=12">personalised diaries</a>. For more info on personalised calendars and personalised diaries please visit iNameIt.co.uk