At 12/2/2004 01:36 PM, John Howell wrote:
>The Christian calendar is no more and no less than a King List ... >with ONLY ONE KING! This is Anno Domine (Year of our Lord) 2004. AD >stands for the Latin (spelling not guaranteed!). It's the BC (before >Christ) convention of numbering backwards that was an arbitrary >invention, and I don't know when it was invented.
The Julian Calendar
In the year 46 BC, the Greek Sosigenes convinced Julius Caesar to reform the Roman calendar to a more manageable form. At this time, Julius also changed the number of days in the months to achieve a 365 day year. In order to "catch up" with the seasons, Julius Caesar also added 90 days to the year 46 BC between November and February (Vardi 1991, p. 238).
The Julian calendar consisted of cycles of three 365-day years followed by a 366-day leap year. Around 9 BC, it was found that the priests in charge of computing the calendar had been adding leap years every three years instead of the four decreed by Caesar (Vardi 1991, p. 239). As a result of this error, no more leap years were added until 8 AD. Leap years were therefore 45 BC, 42 BC, 39 BC, 36 BC, 33 BC, 30 BC, 27 BC, 24 BC, 21 BC, 18 BC, 15 BC, 12 BC, 9 BC, 8 AD, 12 AD, and every fourth year thereafter (T�ndering). The UNIX command cal incorrectly lists 4 AD as a leap year (Vardi 1991).
...
The Gregorian Calendar
One of (Pope) Gregory's most lasting legacies was his "Gregorian Calendar," which was actually a revision of an earlier Roman calendar, that most of us, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and everyone else, find ourselves using today. From it, we mark the "New Year" in the dead of winter (in the northern hemisphere) or the heat of summer (in the southern hemisphere), rather than in the spring as God commanded.
With the assistance of the Italian astronomer Luigi Lilio Ghiraldi and the German Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius, Gregory introduced his namesake calendar in 1582. Gregory's calendar was primarily intended to correct the accumulated inaccuracies of the Julian Calendar (named after Julius Caesar), which, because it was slightly too long (365.25 days per year rather than the actual 365.242199 days), had caused an apparent 10-day error in the equinoxes by the Middle Ages i.e. the spring (vernal) equinox was by then arriving about March 31 on the Julian calendar, rather than about March 21.
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