N is for ... New ... n ... Need ...

 

Today is the start of the Bengali New Year 1428 – so shubho noboborsho to all those observing. A number of regions and communities in India mark the beginning of the year around mid-April. But both January and April as starting points seem a little strange to me because, well, why should anyone begin the year when it’s bitterly cold or scorching hot? Isn’t spring a much more natural choice? It’s a question that’s been niggling at me for sometime.

But before we look at the history of time keeping and calendars and such like, an intriguing and more fundamental question is - why? What is the need for humans to mark days and months and years? One obvious answer is of course agriculture - once humans starting farming, they had to keep track of the seasons. But that doesn't explain the mystery of the Ishango bone, which I have talked about in one of my earlier A-Zs. One of the theories is that the Ishango bone marks a six month lunar cycle, possibly to keep track of a woman's menstrual cycle, some 18,000-20,000 years ago. This is an educated guess only - it cannot be conclusively proved with that length of time. But isn't it nifty! to imagine a woman that long ago notching a handy bone to make sure she knew her cycles, wow!

The evidence of timekeeping goes back deep into prehistory, to Neolithic times. Agriculture happened many millennia before humans learnt to write things down. Archaeologists have found megalithic structures that likely tracked the solstices, i.e. the solar year and seasons. Such arrangements have been unearthed in Victoria, Australia (11,000 y.a.) and Aberdeenshire (10,000 y.a.), to mention just two. Europe has some 35,000 megaliths, some of which are arranged in astronomically aligned circles. The most famous of these is of course, Stonehenge, which dates to around 5000 years ago. 

The Sumerians, Ancient Egyptians and the Assyrians were some of the first civilisations and therefore first to devise formal calendars. In fact, the Egyptian Coptic calendar in use today is based on the Ancient Egyptian calendar, and farmers in Egypt still follow the three seasons of Inundation, Growth and Harvest as marked in Ancient Egypt to seed and harvest their crops. The new year, called Nayrouz, starts on 11th/12th September, what used to mark the flooding of the Nile before it was dammed. 

The Babylonian calendar was a lunisolar one and by 2000 BCE they observed a spring festival and marked the new year in March around the vernal equinox. The Persian calendar dates back to the 2nd millennium BCE and has been tweaked many times as dynasties rose and fell, wars were won or lost. One of the major tweaks in the 11th century was done by none other than Omar Khayyam, who was also an ace mathematician and astronomer in addition to being an ace poet. He designed the Jalali calendar that provided the basis of the calendar in use currently in Iran, even after a millennium. The new year in the present Iranian calendar, known as Nowruz, is still marked on the first day of spring. 

The early Roman calendar also designated 1st March as the start of the year. Ancient Romans divided the year into ten months, something that's apparent even today. The names of the last four months - September, October, November and December reflect the ten month calendar (Septem, Octo, Novem and Decem are Latin for seven, eight, nine and ten respectively). January and February were devised and tacked on, according to legend by the second king Numa, first at the end of the year, but at some point got moved to the beginning. New Year celebrations were moved to 1st of January to coincide with the practice of inaugurating the new consuls on that day. But private and religious celebrations continued to mark March as the new year still. 

The fundamental problem with any calendar is that the astronomical year does not have a whole number of days nor a whole number of lunar months. Nor does a lunar month have a whole number of days. There are always fractions left over which result in slippages and cycles becoming misaligned. Over time, the differences can become substantial. That is why Julius Caesar in 46 BCE reformed the Roman calendar by edict, the reforms taking effect from 1st January 45 BCE. The Julian calendar remained the predominant calendar in the Roman Empire and the Western world for more than a millennium. However, even after local calendars were aligned to it, they still began the year on different dates. The concept of the New Year's Day remained quite fluid right up to medieval times. 

Although the Julian calendar was adopted widely and remained in use for nearly 1600 years, it contained a slight inaccuracy in the measurement of the solar year. That caused the seasonal dates to regress by one day in a century. Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian calendar to rectify this slippage in 1582.  This is the calendar most widely in use across the world today, only Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Nepal do not use the Gregorian calendar. Most Western countries adopted the Julian/Gregorian calendars over a period spanning 16th to 18th century and then introduced it to their colonies. Many countries use the Gregorian as a civil calendar and a different liturgical calendar (Hijri, Coptic, Hindu) for religious festivals. This is why the Bengali new year does not start on 1st January.  

A-Z Challenge 2021