The Calendar Read Online Free PDF Page B

This stabilized the Egyptian calendar so that the first of Thoth always fell on 29 August.
    *The royal dynasty of the Ptolemies should not be confused with the second century Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy.
     
    Egyptians were not alone in their early turning to the sun. Far beyond the great Nile valley and even the Mediterranean, on the distant edge of the Eurasian continent, a little-understood people also figured out a close approximation of the solar year a few centuries after the Egyptians. We know this only because they left behind what appears to be an enormous calendar constructed out of immense slabs of bluestone, standing upright to form megaliths, some of them topped by lintels called henges. Standing on the barren Salisbury plain, this structure, Stonehenge, was used for over two thousand years by ancient Britons, who aligned the stones so that at the precise moment of the summer solstice a ray of sun shines down the main avenue and into its centre. But what was this for? Is Stonehenge truly an enormous calendar? Or is it an observatory, a fortress, a temple, a Bronze Age place of assembly--or all of the above?
    No one knows for sure, though the layout leaves no doubt that the people who built it were astronomically sophisticated enough to build a device to accurately measure the solar year. Further evidence comes from stones erected in patterns around Stonehenge that align with the sun at both solstices and at the equinoxes, and with the moon as it runs through its orbit around the earth. This giant calendar would have allowed an ancient Briton to anticipate astronomic cycles and events as accurately as the Egyptians watching Sirius--or, for that matter, a modem astronomer using solar and star charts. Some have claimed that Stonehenge can also foretell eclipses of the moon, which occur regularly after those months when the full moon rises precisely down the main avenue.
     
    The other ancient culture that invented sun time early on, the Maya, was far more isolated than the people of Wessex. Raising great cities filled with temples and palaces deep in the interior of Central America, the Maya also invented a calendric system so accurate that when the Spaniards conquered them in the sixteenth century, the Julian calendar the conquistadors brought with them was less precise.
    The Maya developed three calendar systems. The first was 365 days long, with 18 months of 20 days, to which they added 5 more days. This was called the haab. As for the Egyptians, these five extra days were considered special, though the Maya believed them to be unlucky and shunned all activity as they anxiously waited for them to pass. Apparently the Maya knew that the year was really closer to 365 1/4 days but ignored it in this calendar, which drifted, like the Egyptian version, about six hours a year. Concurrently with this 365-day calendar the Maya used a 260-day cycle called a tzolkin, or ‘sacred round’, which served a similar purpose as Hesiod’s ‘Days’, listing omens and associations for each day to guide the Maya and other Mesoamericans in planting, waging war and offering sacrifices to the gods. The 260-day cycle was developed early in the first millennium BC by the Zapotecs of Mexico, for reasons that remain obscure. Common to all sophisticated Mesoamerican peoples by the time of the Maya, who first appear in about 1000 BC, the tzolkin was joined to the 365-day calendar in a complex cycle of 52 years called the Calendar Round. This is the time it takes for both calendars to start again on the same day. Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century reported that the end of a 52-year cycle was commemorated by all advanced cultures in the region. It was universally greeted with great despondency, the people fearing that the sun might not return.
    The third Maya calendar was the Long Count, used to calculate long periods of time. It was based on 360-day unit called a tun and a number system based on 20 (Mesoamericans