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THE MAYAN AND OTHER ANCIENT CALENDARS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Geoff Stray | 64 pages | 16 Oct 2007 | Wooden Books | 9781904263609 | English | Powys, United Kingdom The Mayan Calendar | Calendars Four days per month were dedicated to Ahura Mazda and seven were named after the six Amesha Spentas. Three were dedicated to the female divinities, Daena yazata of religion and personified conscious , Ashi yazata of fortune and Arshtat justice. The Parthians Arsacid dynasty adopted the same calendar system with minor modifications, and dated their era from BC, the date they succeeded the Seleucids. Their names for the months and days are Parthian equivalents of the Avestan ones used previously, differing slightly from the Middle Persian names used by the Sassanians. When in April of AD the Parthian dynasty fell and was replaced by the Sasanid, the new king, Ardashir I , abolished the official Babylonian calendar and replaced it with the Zoroastrian. This involved a correction to the places of the gahanbar , which had slipped back in the seasons since they were fixed. These were placed eight months later, as were the epagemonai , the 'Gatha' or 'Gah' days after the ancient Zoroastrian hymns of the same name. Other countries, such as the Armenians and Choresmians, did not accept the change. Toghril Beg , the founder of the Seljuq dynasty , had made Esfahan the capital of his domains and his grandson Malik-Shah was the ruler of that city from Other leading astronomers were also brought to the Observatory in Esfahan and for 18 years Khayyam led the scientists and produced work of outstanding quality. During this time Khayyam led work on compiling astronomical tables and he also contributed to calendar reform in Cowell quotes the Calcutta Review No When the Malik Shah determined to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight learned men employed to do it, the result was the Jalali era so called from Jalal-ud-din, one of the king's names - 'a computation of time,' says Gibbon, 'which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style. Khayyam measured the length of the year as Two comments on this result. Firstly it shows an incredible confidence to attempt to give the result to this degree of accuracy. We know now that the length of the year is changing in the sixth decimal place over a person's lifetime. Secondly it is outstandingly accurate. The Greeks, as early as the time of Homer , appear to have been familiar with the division of the year into the twelve lunar months but no intercalary month Embolimos or day is then mentioned. Independent of the division of a month into days, it was divided into periods according to the increase and decrease of the moon. Thus, the first day or new moon was called Noumenia. The month in which the year began, as well as the names of the months, differed among the states, and in some parts even no names existed for the months, as they were distinguished only numerically, as the first, second, third, fourth month, etc. The ancient Athenian calendar was a lunisolar calendar with day years, consisting of twelve months of alternating length of 29 or 30 days. To keep the calendar in line with the solar year of See also: Athenian Calendar. A reconstruction of the Attic Calendar is given by Academy of Episteme. In addition to their regular, "festival" calendar, the Athenians maintained a second, political calendar. This "conciliar" calendar divided the year into " prytanies ", one for each of the " phylai ", the subdivisions of Athenian citizens. The number of phylai, and hence the number of prytanies, varied over time. Until BC, there were 10 phylai. After that the number varies between 11 and 13 usually Even more confusing, while the conciliar and festival years were about the same length in the 4th century BC, such was not regularly the case earlier or later. Documents dated by prytany are frequently very difficult to assign to a particular equivalent in the Julian calendar. The Greek calendars were greatly diversified by the Hellenistic period , with separate traditions in every Greek state. Of primary importance for the reconstruction of the regional Greek calendars is the calendar of Delphi , because of the numerous documents found there recording the manumission of slaves, many of which are dated both in the Delphian and in a regional calendar. The Roman Republican calendar numbered years based on the sitting consuls. It was called a nundinum or 'nine-day' in inclusive counting. The months of these calendars begin on the day with the new moon, with 12 or 13 months lunations in a year. The intercalary month is placed at the end of the year. It follows the rules of Zhuanxu's calendar, but the months order follows the Xia's calendar. Timekeeping was important to Vedic rituals, and Jyotisha was the Vedic-era field of tracking and predicting the movements of astronomical bodies in order to keep time, in order to fix the day and time of these rituals, [16] [17] [18] which were developed around the end of 2nd millennium BC as mentioned in "Sathapatha Brahmana". The Jyotisha text Brahma-siddhanta , probably composed in the 5th century AD, discusses how to use the movement of planets, sun and moon to keep time and calendar. Water clock and sun dials are mentioned in many ancient Hindu texts such as the Arthashastra. Modern Hindu calendar , sometimes referred to as Panchanga , is a collective term for the various lunisolar calendars traditionally used in Hinduism. They adopt a similar underlying concept for timekeeping, but differ in their relative emphasis to moon cycle or the sun cycle, the names of months and when they consider the New Year to start. The Hindu calendars have been in use in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times, and remain in use by the Hindus in India and Nepal, particularly to set Hindu festival dates. Early Buddhist and Jain communities of India adopted the ancient Hindu calendar, later Vikrami calendar and then local Buddhist calendars. Buddhist and Jain festivals continue to be scheduled according to a lunar system in the luni-solar calendar. The old Roman year had days divided into 10 months, beginning with March. However the ancient historian Livy gave credit to the second early Roman king Numa Pompilius for devising a calendar of 12 months. The extra months Ianuarius and Februarius had been invented, supposedly by Numa Pompilius, as stop-gaps. The system remained in use during the early Middle Ages until the widespread adoption of the Dionysian era in the Carolingian period. The seven-day week has a tradition reaching back to the ancient Near East, but the introduction of the "planetary week" which remains in modern use dates to the Roman Empire period see also names of the days of the week. It contained both pagan and Christian festivals. The oldest extant manuscript of the early Christian calendar is the so-called Calendar of Filocalus , produced in AD A more extensive martyrology was compiled by Jerome in the early 5th century. Jean Mabillon published a calendar of the church of Carthage made in ca. AD The Anno Domini epoch is introduced in the 6th century. Hieronymo superpositis, ad explorandum Septimanae Diem, et Lunae Aetatem investigandam in unoquoque Die per xix Annos. In the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede the Venerable used another Latin term, " ante uero incarnationis dominicae tempus " "the time before the Lord's true incarnation", equivalent to the English "before Christ" , to identify years before the first year of this era. The Icelandic calendar was introduced in the 10th century. While the ancient Germanic calendars were based on lunar months, the new Icelandic calendar introduced a purely solar reckoning, with a year having a fixed number of weeks 52 weeks or days. This necessitated the introduction of "leap weeks" instead of the Julian leap days. In , the medieval scientist Roger Bacon stated the times of full moons as a number of hours, minutes, seconds, thirds, and fourths horae , minuta , secunda , tertia , and quarta after noon on specified calendar dates. Rival calendar eras to Anno Domini remained in use in Christian Europe. For chronological purposes, the flaw of the Anno Domini system was that dates have to be reckoned backwards or forwards according as they are BC or AD. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia , "in an ideally perfect system all events would be reckoned in one sequence. The difficulty was to find a starting point whence to reckon, for the beginnings of history in which this should naturally be placed are those of which chronologically we know least. The Islamic calendar is based on the prohibition of intercalation nasi' by Muhammad , in Islamic tradition dated to a sermon held on 9 Dhu al-Hijjah AH 10 Julian date: 6 March This resulted in an observationally based lunar calendar shifting relative to the seasons of the solar year. The Haab is a day solar calendar which is divided into 18 months of 20 days each and one month which is only 5 days long Uayeb. The calendar has an outer ring of Mayan glyphs pictures which represent each of the 19 months. Each day is represented by a number in the month followed by the name of the month. Each glyph represents a personality associated with the month. The Haab is somewhat inaccurate as it is exactly days long. An actual tropical or solar year , the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, takes about It is a day calendar with 20 periods of 13 days, and it is used to determine the time of religious and ceremonial events.