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Concept
Calendar
Summary
A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physical record (often paper) of such a system. A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a court calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as a calendar of wills.
Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. The most common type of pre-modern calendar was the lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar that occasionally adds one intercalary month to remain synchronized with the solar year over the long term.
The term calendar is taken from kalendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare 'to call out', referring to the "calling" of the new moon when it was first seen. Latin calendarium meant 'account book, register' (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month). The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century (the spelling calendar is early modern).
History of calendars
The course of the sun and the moon are the most salient regularly recurring natural events useful for timekeeping, and in pre-modern societies around the world lunation and the year were most commonly used as time units. Nevertheless, the Roman calendar contained remnants of a very ancient pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year.
The first recorded physical calendars, dependent on the development of writing in the Ancient Near East, are the Bronze Age Egyptian and Sumerian calendars.
During the Vedic period India developed a sophisticated timekeeping methodology and calendars for Vedic rituals. According to Yukio Ohashi, the Vedanga calendar in ancient India was based on astronomical studies during the Vedic Period and was not derived from other cultures.
Official source
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