I read an essay by an author who says that the
ancient Egyptians had a
365-day calendar which caused them some trouble.
Since one year is in fact
slightly longer than 365 days, their calendar
started to "wander", according to him,
so that holidays which belonged in the
winter occured in the summer. This
caused a lot of "anger and confusion", he
writes. Is this true?
As far as I know, all ancient civilisations who had
calendars, from South America to
Asia, were aware of this problem and had
more or less accurate systems of
leap years, extra months etc. to compensate
for this. They didn't know that
the Earth was orbiting the Sun, but they knew when
the winter solstice was,
and were able to measure the length of one year
accurately enough. All ancient
civilisations were pretty good astronomers and it
seems
hard to believe that they were "forced to celebrate
Christmas in the summer"
(as this guy writes).
But wait... what about the Islamic calendar?
If I remember correctly (I once
worked with some people from Turkey), islamic holidays, like Ramadan,
are moving around the year like this,
because
of the Islamic calendar. Perhaps someone on this
list could
straighten this out? I'd be grateful for any information about how
Egypt and
other ancient civilisations handled this
problem.
Hakan