Sorry I haven’t really posted much here lately. But what with Christmas and family, some things had to be put aside. But I figured that I’d pop in and wish everyone a Merry Whatever and a Happy New Year (to those of you who use the Gregorian calendar that is!)

History of the Calendar

Methods of keeping time date back as far as the Neolithic Era with the logical units for keeping time are the day, the lunar cycle and the solar year.

Most calendars followed a lunisolar method of organization which is to say, each date was determined by both the solar and lunar positions in the sky mostly based on observation.

The Roman calendar was restructured by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE becoming the Julian calendar. This new calendar was not based on the observation of the cycle of the moon but rather used an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years.

The Gregorian calendar was later introduced in 1582 as an improvement over the Julian calendar. This is the same calendar that is commonly used today amongst the secular society.

“The term calendar itself is taken from calendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare “to call out”, referring to the “calling” of the new moon when it was first seen. Latin calendarium meant “account book, register” (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month). The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century (the spelling calendar is early modern). ” – Wikipedia entry on Calendar, History of the