Why do we have seven days in a week ?

By Desk Editor June 15, 2021 55 No comment

A calendar is a mechanism for keeping track of days. This is accomplished by naming time intervals, which are commonly days, weeks, months, and years. Within such a system, a date is the designation of a single, unique day. A calendar is a physical record of such a system (typically made of paper).

A calendar can also refer to a list of upcoming events, such as a court calendar, or a partially or completely chronological list of papers, such as a wills calendar. Calendar periods (such as years and months) are usually, but not always, synced with the sun’s or moon’s cycle.

The lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar that adds one intercalary month every few years to stay in sync with the solar year over the long run, was the most frequent type of pre-modern calendar.

The term calendar comes from calendae, the Roman phrase for the first day of the month, which is related to the word calare, which means “to call out,” and refers to the new moon’s “calling” when it was first seen. Calendarium was a Latin word that meant “account book, register” (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month).

By the 13th century, the Latin phrase had been adopted in Old French as calendier, and from there in Middle English as calender (the spelling calendar is early modern)

The ancients used the phases of the moon to keep track of time.

The ancients used to keep track of time by charting the phases of the moon from new to full, which is thought to be the origin of the word month and occurs every 29 and a half days. Archaeologists have unearthed some of the Oldest Lunar Calendars etched onto sticks and animal bones, as well as in stunning cave art found in France and Germany.

When Sirius rose with the Sun, the Egyptian year began.

The ancient Egyptian calendar, which began in 4236 BCE and divided the year into 12 months, began when the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, which they associated with the goddess Isis, rose with the sun.

The length of time it takes for Sirius to rise heliacally is exactly the same as our solar year (365.242199 days), therefore the Egyptian year was determined to be 365 days long, with 30 days assigned to each month and an extra 5 festival days added to make up the difference.

The Mayan Calendar is more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar.

The Mayan calendar dates back to at least the 5th century BCE, and by 900 AD, it had been polished into a complex, but highly precise calendar, even more precise than the present Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar, for example, acquires three days every 10,000 years, whereas the Mayan calendar loses only two days in the same time frame.

Julian Calendar Out By 11½ minutes A Year

The Roman calendar originally had ten months, commencing in March and ending in December, stretched over 304 days, but around 700 BCE, the months of January and February were added, bringing the year’s length to 355 days.