Product Description

The 5,000-year struggle to align the heavens with the clock 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 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 acurate 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 thirty-one in his month, Augustus determined that he should have the same, so he pinched one from February). The Calendar links politics and religion, astronomy and mathematics, Cleopatra and Stephen Hawking. And it is published as millions of computer users wonder what will happen when, after 31 December 1999, their dates run out!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #130364 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In this book, David Ewing Duncan traces the development of our modern-day calendar and describes how people's experiences are shaped by their conception of time. Duncan postulates that all this concern with time started when a Cro-Magnon man decided to mark off the days of the lunar cycle on an eagle bone. After recounting the slow evolution of the calendar through the centuries, the author laments how time oriented our society has become: "There are moments when I am hopelessly late, or cannot possibly fit anything else into my schedule, when I sigh and wish that Cro-Magnon man 13,000 years ago in the Dordogne Valley had set aside his eagle bone and gone to bed."

The book is organised in chronological order and focuses mainly on the centuries leading up to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar (our modern calendar) by the Catholic Church in 1582. Along the way, Duncan describes the ancient calendars of many cultures all over the globe, from India to Egypt to the Mayan empire. During the Middle Ages, Christian churches discouraged scientific inquiry on the theory that it was wrong to question the nature of God's creation. This severely hampered the refinement of the calendar and the advancement of many academic pursuits. By the 16th century, Europe's calendars were 11 days out of sync with the solar year, which meant Easter was being celebrated on the wrong day. An infusion of knowledge from India and the Middle East helped Europeans get back on track. Duncan profiles the many mathematicians, philosophers, and monks who made organising time their life's work. This book honours the efforts of those scholars and examines the way politics and religion influenced societal perceptions of time through the ages. --Jill Marquis, Amazon.com

About the Author
David Ewing Duncan is a writer and traveller. The author of three previous books this is his first UK publication. He is also the curator of the Smithsonian exhibition of The Calendar.

Customer Reviews

Instructive and accessible general overview
A long and instructive journey through time and time measuring. The reader is taken from civilizations using the moon cycles to measure time to the first solar calendars, the successive way of naming of the months and days, the secularisation of the concept of "hour" leaving the monastic rhythm to correspond to a certain amount of time indicated on the first mechanical clocks, and more and more accurate mathematical concepts and instruments of measure, since the researches go on.

No need to be a clockmaker or good at mathematics, however: everything is said in plain English, with even a pinch of suspense that keeps pushing you towards the next page.

Since the story of the calendar is closely related to that of Western social structure, the balance between religious and secular powers, and our daily life and beliefs, it also informs us on our cultural history. We discover, for instance, the importance of the long debate about when exactly Easter should be celebrated at a time when the Christian Churches (Catholic and Orthodox, mainly) had great political powers. We also see how life in growing cities of merchants imposed agreements on the calendar that would allow deadlines to be fixed and respected, and actions to be taken against those who wouldn't meet them.

The book gives a succession of key-moments or smaller events, which remind us of the extreme relativity of something we tend to take for granted - the calendar.

It is written with a pleasant fluency by an author who clearly recognizes he isn't an expert in the field but obviously researched the subject with great care. Some points are maybe treated a bit too extensively, but let's take it for a side-effect of the author's enthusiam.

The story of how people have learnt to measure time.
The author admits that his approach is that of a story-teller, not an academic. His style is patchy and uneven, and the pace varies with his degree of interest in the period about which he is writing. The book appears to have been spell-checked but not proof-read; every so often there is something odd in the text that should have been picked up before printing. On the good side, it's a generally enjoyable read with lots of fascinating detail about the development of maths - e.g. why we have 360º in a circle - and the author is very enthusiastic and gosh-wow. The trouble with amateur historians....With a little more effort and precision this book could have been excellent. It just needed a tougher-minded editor.

Fascinating
The Calendar is a masterful account of something we are all familiar with on a daily basis, and mostly just take for granted. The story of how the calendar took shape, from mankind's starting position of knowing nothing about the environment he lived in, up to modern times is fascinating, and spans many great civilisations and religions.