The Calendar: The 5000 Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days

Measuring the daily and yearly cycle of the cosmos has never been entirely straightforward. The year 2000 is alternatively the year 2544 (Buddhist), 6236 (Ancient Egyptian), 5761 (Jewish) or simply the Year of the Dragon (Chinese). The story of the creation of the Western calendar, which is related in this book, is a story of emperors and popes, mathematicians and monks, and the growth of scientific calculation to the point where, bizarrely, our measurement of time by atomic pulses is now more accurate than time itself: the Earth is an elderly lady and slightly eccentric - she loses half a second a century. Days have been invented (Julius Caesar needed an extra 80 days in 46BC), lost (Pope Gregory XIII ditched ten days in 1582) and moved (because Julius Caesar had 31 in his month, Augustus determined that he should have the same, so he pinched one from February).… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

I had such high hopes for this book. Being an afficianado of calendar information myself, I looked forward to expanding my knowledge of the intricacies and oddities of the calendar. Unfortunately, this work is not the thorough and scholarly work I hoped it would be. Instead it is too light-weight

and popular. There is nothing wrong with light-weight, popular reading, but when it is posing as a learned, academic book worthy of serious consideration, it disappoints.

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LibraryThing member seanoc

This fascinating book takes a look back at the events that shaped the modern day calender,from 4236BC(the earliest known date),through to the invention of the atomic clock,the reader is taken through a succession of tales involving science,religion,superstition and politics,to the present day.It

details the struggle to calculate Easter,how an accurate calender was needed to keep track of the stars and planets .A truly engrossing book well worth a read.

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LibraryThing member justininlondon

I just wanted to add a mini-review here. It's been at least a couple of years since I read this book but my overall recollection is one of disappointment. This is a fascinating subject but it just wasn't well written at all. Yes, it's a short-ish book but that's not the main problem. It's simply

not engagingly or coherently written. Perhaps it was over-ambitious for a short work, trying to squeeze too much in. I kept wondering quite how much I would have understood had I come to the book with no basic knowledge of the subject already. One of those books where I arrived with a keen interest in the subject but came away even more confused.

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LibraryThing member ablueidol

Surprised at the cool reviews of this book. I found it fascinating to follow how the concepts of time were shaped by the theological politics of post Roman world. It was a long case history of the damage that types of Monotheistic practices has to done to attempts of understanding of the world.

These are still current with strands of Islam and Christianity.

It is also a lesson to see how the baton of progress passes from one culture to another as they rise and decay. A timely check to those in the west especially America that think they will always be the leaders of the moment.

And chilling to see how much we lost at the fall of the Roman Empire. If the Germanic tribes and Byzantium empire had not fatally weaken themselves then perhaps it would have been less of rupture and the rise of an autocratic church delayed but this would have reduced the impact of Islam and its rich contributions to world culture.

It also asks us to questions what we assume today to be true that tomorrow will be seen as so wrong as to blind us to the obvious.

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LibraryThing member stephenrbown

This was a well written account of the long struggle to create an accurate ongoing calendar of days. This task was much more difficult than I ever imagined. consider: do you use the moon as your base? The Sun? All the obvious ways of calculating the number of days in a year are inaccurate. A great

irony is that the latest nuclear clocks are actually too precise because they fail to take into account the declining speed of the earth's rotation.

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LibraryThing member neurodrew

This was a fascinating book about the development of calendars, with a great deal of early medieval history. It revivied my interest in issues such as the equinox, the ecliptic, and the sidereal versus equatorial year. finished about midSept, 1998.

LibraryThing member FKarr

anecdotal but not very rigorous history of the creation of the calendar; weak on why this matters beyond Easter

LibraryThing member JBD1

A popular history of humanity's attempts to document the passage of time using a calendar system. Not much in the way of scholarly citation, and Duncan really tries to pack it all in here, but I was intrigued and engaged throughout, and thought the book ended up being quite good.

LibraryThing member Catherine.Cox

A great read. This book covers so many levels of history. The story starts in what is now India and ends with changes to the calendar we use today still changing in some parts of Europe in the 1900's. Fascinating information about the inter-relatedness of astronomy and religion. I had no idea what

a problem it is for religions when the major holidays can't be pinned down.

I also didn't understand the nothing is absolute yet. The leap year is not a full solution.

Good book.

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