![]() But despite its longevity, it wasn’t yet perfect. The Romans bequeathed it to their successors and, in a testament to its merits, this model of timekeeping dominated the Western world for 16 centuries. It was a vast improvement over the one it replaced. (it lasted 445 days, to correct for calendrical drift) came 45 B.C., and with it the dawn of Caesar’s eponymous Julian calendar. ![]() It was an apt offering - Janus was the god of beginnings.Īfter the extraordinary year of 46 B.C. 1 new year, partly for tradition’s sake and partly to honor Janus, the double-faced god for whom the month was named. Rome’s new system preserved many of its precursor’s parts, including the 12 months and most of their names (July was renamed for Caesar, and August, later, for Emperor Augustus). Ptolemy III Euergetes of Egypt had tried and failed to enact this reform in his own country, after his subjects rejected the irregular addition. One of its most notable features was the leap day, designed to offset the extra day that accumulates every four years because the solar year is actually slightly longer than 365 days. To solve the problem, the rising dictator enlisted Sosigenes, an Alexandrian philosopher he’d met while visiting Egypt during his recent military campaign (and affair with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra).īorrowing from his homeland, Sosigenes introduced the state-of-the-art 365-day calendar. The calendar, in the course of its haphazard modification over the centuries, had fallen into hopeless disarray. The Julian revolutionīy the time Julius Caesar took charge of Rome, in 46 B.C., he had on his hands not only a civil war but also a temporal crisis. “It’s a system that’s very hard to calculate and very, very easy to abuse,” Overtoom says. In practice, though, it became a tool for corrupt pontifices to manipulate the calendar whenever they wished to extend the terms of their political allies. In theory, it could be inserted every so often as “a stopgap to jolt the calendar back into correct alignment with the solar year,” Overtoom says. To set it right, the Roman high priests, or pontifices, established a special month called Mercedonius. “Your calendar is going to drift very quickly.” “That’s going to cause a lot of problems,” says Nikolaus Overtoom, an expert in ancient Mediterranean history at Washington State University. It only accounted for 355, falling well short of the actual length of the earth’s orbit around the Sun. Still, the early Roman calendar left something to be desired - namely, about 10 extra days. But in 154 B.C., the Senate, facing an urgent rebellion in Spain, decided to elect the two new consules early, on Jan. Traditionally those terms began on the Ides of March, near the start of the military season and smack in the middle of the month named for Mars, the god of war. Instead, the calendar for this civically-minded republic reset on the same day as the terms for its highest elected political office, the consulship (made up of two consules). The story begins with the Romans, who, unlike many of their predecessors, didn’t tie their New Year to an astronomical event. 1 emerge as the near-ubiquitous New Year’s Day of modern times? A confounding calendar Why, out of these and so many other options, did Jan. The Greeks preferred December’s winter solstice. Other societies, including the Egyptians, Persians and Phoenicians, marked their collective cultural rebirth on the autumnal equinox in late September. This date in late March, when the day and night are equal in length, is a popular choice for civilizations. The first recorded New Year’s celebration traces back to Mesopotamia, where 4,000 years ago the ancient Babylonians kicked off an 11-day festival called Akitu on the vernal equinox. But had the winding road of the past two millenia run another course, it’s possible we would now be planning to ring in 2021 on any number of dates. 1 is the most familiar to Americans and most of Western civilization, and its recognition continues to grow around the world. Humans throughout history have begun their years on so many different days that the alternatives, to quote late British historian A.
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