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Home , Anno Mundi, Coptic calendar, Earthly Branches, Egyptian calendar, Fiscal year, Heavenly Stems

Chapter 5 –

Luckily, most of the problems involving have mostly been solved and packed away in software and hardware where we, and our customers overseas, do not have to deal with it. Thanks to standardization, if a vender in Peking wants to call a customer in , he checks the Internet for the local time. As far as international business goes, it’s generally 24/7 anyway. on the other hand, are another matter. You know what time it is in Khövsgöl, Mongolia, but are you sure what it is, if it is a holiday, or even what it is?

The purpose of this chapter is to make you aware of just how many active calendars there are out there in current use and of the short comings of our Gregorian system as we try to apply it to the rest of the world. There just isn’t room to review them all so think of this as a kind of around the world in 80 days. There are so many different living calendars, and since the Internet is becoming our greatest library yet, a great many ancient ones that must be accounted for as well. We must consider them all in our collations. As I write this in 2010 by the Gregorian , it is 2960 in Northwest Africa, 1727 in Ethopia, and 4710 by the .

A calendar is a symbol of identity. They fix important festivals and dates and help us share a common pacing in our lives. They are the most common framework a civilization or group of people can have. Although the politicians who are in charge may beg to differ, you could think of the regions in which calendars are used as the true boundaries of civilizations for these are the boundaries of tradition and thought. It’s their ability to reinforce tradition that makes them so attractive to the world’s religions, who maintain the use of many ancient calendars. The sad fact though is that many today are in decline despite being secular national standards and could disappear in sprawl of the Internet.

Calendar Mechanics

Most of the calendars in use today are lunisolar calendars, using both the and the , because both the sun and the moon are so important to us. We rise with the sun and we hide and sleep when it is gone. The plants that are the foundations of our civilizations come and go with its annual cycles. The moon provides the cadence with which we mark the passage of the . It’s for these cycles that we invented calendars. Farming cycles are desperately important to us and so we mark the seasons, a for sowing, a season for reaping, and holidays to be thankful that we got it all done and to pray that it will all start again next year.

Solar calendars are based on the position of the in its orbit around the Sun. At some point each year the Sun, after appearing to make its transit around the sky as measured against the background stars, arrives back at a particular position. Of course you can’t measure background stars against the Sun because it’s too bright, so people generally used some star relative to the position of the sun, for instance the rise of at the of sunset. Seasons are marked by the declination of the Sun, its height above the horizon when it’s at its zenith which, thanks to the Earth’s tilt, rises and falls with the year.

There are two kinds of . What everyone hopes to measure by using a star to measure the position of the Sun is The , the year as measured by the seasons. Tropical in this case has nothing to do with the tropics. It comes from the Greek word tropikos, to turn. However, what they get instead, thanks to a thing called precession, is the which is about 20 different. If you have ever played with a top one of best parts is where to top defies gravity tipping in a lazy circle around its axis. The spinning Earth does this too. It takes 26,000 years to make a complete circuit which may seem like a long time to you and me, but to calendars which are meant to last for thousands of years, can become a big annoyance. It tweaks the position of the Sun against the background stars. It’s a day’s drift every 72 years, which in calendar terms mounts up pretty quickly. Astronomers throughout the have struggled to reconcile the two measures of the year with odd adjustments and extra days, minutes, and added with varying periodicity. This isn’t . That’s because the length of the day doesn’t exactly align with the length of the year.

True lunar calendars ignore the sun and instead look to the moon to mark off the seasons. The problem with lunar calendars is that the year is about 12.3 long, not exactly 12, so their years don’t match the seasons. The Assyrians used the earliest known . It started in 4730 BCE, probably predating the . A more common living example is the , which has 12 uniform lunar months of about 29.5 days. It drifts against the Sun at a rate of 11 or 12 days a year losing a solar year every 33 Islamic years. It takes 354.37 days to make 12 lunations, or cycles of the moon, one lunar year. That drift means their calendar is independent of the seasons that farming calendars are tied to. It is instead linked instead to higher ideals.

Most calendars are lunisolar calendars. They use both the Sun and the Moon in an uncomfortable mix. The lunar and solar years do not match and so the months either drift independent of the year or they are stretched to fit and thus loose synch with the real lunar . The , is a mishmash of odd length months that have nothing to do with the actual phase of the Moon.

Calendars can also be classified by primary use. There are agricultural calendars that keep track of the cycles of the growing season. There are religious calendars that deal with festivals and astronomical and astrological cycles. And there are secular or civil calendars that are concerned with the coordination of labor. Most calendars are to a greater or lesser degree, a mix of all of these. Many ancient calendars are maintained by churches. These should not be discounted. They own some of the greatest libraries in the world.

The Gregorian Calendar

The most commonly accepted calendar on our planet is the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory the XIII, in 1582. It updated the older , introduced by in 46 BCE, to correct a minor annual drift of 11 minutes a year. That seems simple doesn’t it? We’ve been looking at statements like that in our schoolbooks for most of our lives. But how could the Gregorian calendar be adopted in 1582 if Gregorian 1582 didn’t exist yet? Was that a Julian 1582? Are all dates before 1582 Julian dates or did somebody go back and fix them? And when did this Before Christ thing start? Julius Caesar was dead before was born. Since we count from the year 1 and the first year the calendar was in operation was 45 BCE, where did the 45 years go?

Julius started his calendar at year 1, or 709 AUC. AUC stands for or “from the founding of the city of Rome”, using the original . A calendar that, although obsolete, still looms large, especially for Biblical scholars. In Julius’ time the Roman calendar, thanks to miscalculation and cut throat politics1 was in shambles and it was starting to affect business. Caesar, being a wise leader, decided that standardization was necessary. Things had gotten so bad with the old calendar that the first year of the calendar had to actually be 446 days long to bring everything back into correct alignment. This first year came to be known as ultimus annus confusionis, or “the last year of confusion”.

The 45 years were lost, so the story goes, because of a Roman abbot named Dionysius Exiguus, a renowned mathematical genius in Rome, in the year 525 CE. He recalculated the tables defining the days that would fall on using, with no explanation other than saying it was the date of the birth of Jesus, a date 45 years later. He reckoned that the enunciation, which is when an angel told Mary she was going to have Jesus had occurred on March 25th in 754 AUC, and thus his birth came 9 months later. They also still regarded March 25th as the , at least until 342, as well. This date was popularized by an English monk, , in his book Ecclesiastical of the English People in 731 BCE. So his 1 CE, , occurred 45 years later and it’s his version of the calendar that stuck although its acceptance was gradual, extending over several centuries, which adds an extra layer of fuzziness to old dates like this.

Anno Domini is not the sole notation for Gregorian dates. Over the last few centuries it has become increasingly common to replace the BC/AD notation with BCE/CE, with CE standing for either the Christian or Common .

And lastly – 1582. Is it 1582 OS for “Old Style”, the old Julian calendar or 1582 NS, for the reformed Julian calendar or just 1582 CE for the Gregorian calendar? The answer is that it’s the Gregorian date, but that it doesn’t really matter for dates as old as this. The process of adoption took a long time and that’s really just the date the Vatican itself started using the calendar to count time. In 1582 the Julian calendar was only about 10 days out of alignment so unless you’re thinking that it happened near ’s Day, then it’s not a concern, unless of course you’re a historian in which case it’s fodder for papers.

But then of course the calendar really did start ticking New Year’s Day, but with calendars and old dates there are problems with just what New Year’s Day is. Back then and really up until the beginning of the 20th , Europeans didn’t have just one. Roman emperors played with the calendar, naming months after themselves or doing things like moving New Year’s Day to their birthday. There were a lot of local calendars left over that once changed by one emperor or another did not get changed back. The Byzantine version of the calendar started the year on September 1st. Many started the year on December

1 Powerful politicians would literally rewrite the calendar so they could delay elections to more favorable days. 25th for the birth of Jesus or March 25th for his incarnation. In England for instance, 1st was only sometimes considered the start of the year. March 25th was the official start of the civil year, and on top of that they didn’t switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1752.2 And so, sometimes you will see English years noted as a wishy-washy 1581/82. In Eastern Europe, where the influence of the and then the following was strong, New Year’s Day remained September 1st until the early 20th century. And then, of course, there’s the Proleptic version of both the Gregorian and Julian calendars which extended the their systems back through history just so you can’t be sure if you’re looking at a Julian date, a Gregorian one, or something older.

The changeover to the Gregorian calendar didn’t actually happen in 1582 anyway. That’s just when the Pope said that everyone ought to start using it and started its running. The last European countries to change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar were and , both in 1918. The Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar; however the calendar was revised in 1927 to bring it closer in line with the Gregorian calendar, but naturally not all parts of the church recognize this. So we currently have the New Style Julian calendar and the Old Style Julian calendar. You must also remember as well that the world is round and that dates can have a terrestrial point of view. From the Western point of view the attack on Pearl Harbor happened on December 7th, but from the Japanese point view across the date line, it was December 8th.

I tell you all this to put a little healthy fear of the Gregorian calendar in all of you. It’s a fine system for day to day use, but for dates going back more than 100 years or so and the further away you get from Europe, in some situations, you may have to handle things gingerly. You can surely see why there can be so much bickering about exact dates, especially when there’s something of value such as property or professional standing involved. Compare the date the date was written with the standards that were in place in the place where the date was written. There is Julian calendar support as well as the normal Gregorian support in all major operating systems, but there can be occasions when you must be aware of which version of each calendar it is they are supporting and the context of the date being noted.

Gregorian Dates

There is a wide range of support for the storage of dates within computers and databases, and thus the Internet. All modern databases have support for the ISO 8601 standard, which is the commonly recognized international standard for the storage of Gregorian dates. But not all use it by default. Many computers store dates based on clock ticks from a certain arbitrary date, usually somewhere in the 1700’s, which limits how far back a date can go. ISO 8601 only guarantees dates back to 1582, however it can be considered as a means of storing earlier Proleptic Gregorian dates. The databases Oracle and PostreSQL can go back to the year -4712, just far enough to cover the conversion of the Egyptian calendar dates to Gregorian ones. Storing old dates like this though runs risks. Data is often moved from one computer to another. The computer you’re moving your date data to may not be as capable as yours. There is no guarantee that one computer will accept the date data of another. So there is no all encompassing solution, no world standard, even for Gregorian dates. There is no native support at all for any other calendars.

2 Samuel Pepys Considering how all pervasive dates are in our lives and how far back our written documents extend, this situation is remarkable.

Although the capabilities of computers to store and use dates is patchy, the ability of databases to accept and display modern Gregorian dates in all their myriad of cultural formats is well established. The input and display of modern Gregorian dates is completely supported. Wikipedia has compiled a nice list of countries and their format requirements.3 If there is a way to write a date, somebody is probably using it. Dates come in three forms, big-endian, middle-endian, and little-endian, depending on what comes first. Big-ending starts with the year, middle-endian starts with the month, and little-endian starts with the day. The parts of the date can be separated by slashes, hyphens, periods, or even words and letters in almost any language. And sometimes they are written out in long hand form in the local language, the form often depending on local custom and the formality of the document. Although some forms may require a little extra programming or adaptation, most of these are acceptable for input and output. The important thing is that modern Gregorian dates, no matter what the language, are stored in a common format that can be collated regardless of the original culture so that document searches can be language independent and results can be tailored to the format that the viewer is accustomed to.

The Berber Calendar

Many ancient calendars, non-Gregorian ones, still live on. A major variant of the Julian calendar is the Berber calendar, an agricultural calendar which is used in Northwest Africa. Its current year starts at Gregorian January 14th, which is the current offset for the old style Julian calendar and uses the standard Julian months. Its chief and most natural difference are the seasons, which are specific to North Africa. In addition to the traditional four seasons there are three local seasons. Llyali, 20 days for the coldest period of winter.

Lḥusum/imbarken, a period of 10 days of high wind. Figure 1. Berber calendars Ssmaym/Awussu, 40 days of summer. Because of the gradual drift of the underlying Julian calendar, the celebration of New Year’s Day was at some point in the fixed at January 12th. Some versions of the calendar began, back in the 1960’s, counting the years from 950 BCE, the date of the ascension of Shoshenq I to the throne of . Shoshenq I is considered to be the first prominent Berber and is a symbol of nationalist aspirations and a good example of a calendar being used in an attempt to reinforce a cultural identity.

Egyptian Influence

3 . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date The developed their calendar very early on, perhaps earlier than 4700 BCE although no one is really quite sure, and had great influence on neighboring cultures. It’s still in use today in the countryside of and with slight variations by the Coptic Church, as the national calendar in , and several Eritrean Christian churches. The original version had 12, 30 day months with an extra five day period at the end to bring the total days to 365, a system adopted for a short period by the French during the years of the Republic. Egyptian months were divided into three 10 day and the year is divided into three seasons: Akhet, Peret, and Shemu, or inundation, growth, and harvest. These were based on the rise and fall of the rather than the Sun. Their calendar did not have a leap year which meant that the seasons drifted through the year a quarter of a day per year, over a period of 1460 years. They were well aware of this, but instead of trying to make their calendar fit the year by adding a leap year, they allowed it to drift. This was called the because it was marked and measured by rise of the star Sothis (Sirius). This cycle was eliminated by the ruler III in 238 BCE, by adding a day every four years, stopping the drift of the seasons. It left the first day of the year, 1, at August 29th on the Julian calendar. The Persians adapted their calendar from the Egyptians around 488 BCE. It was from the Egyptians, somewhere around 600 BCE that the Greeks learned of the 365 day year and it was Greek calculations that caused Ptolemy III to introduce the leap year to Egypt eight centuries later.

It is an indication of the power of the Egyptian identity and the hold that the Nile has on their lives that they have clung to their calendar despite the best efforts of some of the world’s greatest empires and religions. Egypt was conquered by in 332 BCE, installing the Ptolemaic kings on the throne of Egypt. The reform of Ptolemy III, a Greek, was not met well by the Egyptian people who saw the change as an abhorrent foreign innovation. The concept of the leap year wasn’t really accepted until the Romans attempted to impose the Julian calendar on Egypt in 30 BCE. It was referred to as “The Greek Year”. The Julian calendar didn’t take hold until they were forced to adopt Christianity, and even then it was only the official calendar. The Julian calendar was later replaced by the Islamic and Gregorian calendars and yet still the Egyptian calendar persisted counting with the rise and fall of the Nile. It remains to be seen if it will survive the onslaught of the cell phone and the Internet.

The Masonic Calendars

The Masons are a fraternal order located primarily in Europe and North America. They were especially popular in the previous three centuries incorporating many of the ruling nobility and intelligentsia in their ranks. Part of the Masonic identity is their calendars, which are used to order their rites and festivals. There are at least six different versions of the Masonic calendar, all based on the Gregorian calendar. The rule is to offset the date for the start of the calendar from anno domini to some other date, thus skewing the year. For instance, the Order of the Royal Arch lists the date their version of the calendar starts from as the date they recon Zerubbabel began building the Temple in . The year 2010 by their calendar would be 2540. I mention these calendars because their dates pop up, like the Masons themselves, in odd places. On grave stones especially, buildings, in documents, even money. Their notation is generally obscure, which can be confusing.

Gregorian Starting Temple Name Notation Offset The year of light Blue Lodge +4000 AL Start of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite +3760 AM Zerubbabel built the 2nd Temple +530 Anno Inventionis AI Royal Arch Blessing of by Melchizedek +1913 Anno Benefacio AB King Solomon’s temple completed Royal and Select Masters +1000 Anno Depositionis A.Dep Start of the order Knights Templar +1000 Anno Ordinis AO

The Hebrew Calendar

The Hebrew calendar is nominally a . I say nominally because it does not follow a fixed length year. It has 12 lunar months of 29 or 30 days with an additional month, Adar II, added occasionally to bring it back in line with the solar year, similar to the which predated it. The Jewish day runs from sunset to sunset rather than using the sun at zenith. It doesn’t recognize the International Date ine. It instead uses the antemeridian of Jerusalem, 144 47’ W, which passes through eastern Alaska. It has a 7 day cycle which runs independently of the month, the same as the Gregorian calendar. In 2010 the Hebrew year 5711 AM began on September 9th and ended September 28th 2011. The years are considered as counting

Figure 2. A Hebrew calendar from the creation of the world, anno mundi, or AM.

The Hebrew calendar is primarily a religious one, with deferring to whatever secular calendar was in effect wherever they happened to be. Israel for instance, defers to the Gregorian calendar for secular matters with most modern printed calendars showing the Hebrew calendar superimposed over the Gregorian one. The calendar is traditionally aligned around the barley harvest and moon sightings in Israel. However, in earlier where Jews were isolated and could not obtain this information, some drift occurred. The most notable example still in use is the Karaite calendar, which can on occasion be a day off.

The Islamic Calendar

The Islamic or Hijri calendar calendar is a true lunar calendar, having nothing to do with the solar year. Hijri means pilgrimage in Arabic and in this case refers to the journey of Mohammed to Medina in 622 BCE. It drifts independent of the seasons. It’s mostly a religious calendar, used to identify festivals and events, and is generally printed superimposed over the Gregorian calendar. It has 12 lunar months irregularly alternating 29 and 30 days. An extra month is added every three years, a cycle called nasi, to bring the calendar into alignment with the sun. The alternation between 29 and 30 days provides a of 29.5 days. The astronomical lunar month is really closer to 29.53 days long, which means that the calendar drifts by about 44 minutes a month. To make up for this one day is added every 3 years. Additional adjustments can be added based on .

The end of the preceding month and the start of the new month are determined by the sighting of the hilal, the thinnest of crescent just after sunset. If it cannot be observed, the month begins after the 30th day of the preceding month. This means that there is no order to which months are 29 and which are 30 days long. Islam has no central authority and these observations are often required to be carried out locally, which means that there can be some variation between different versions of the calendar for any particular year. The identification of festival dates is also dependent on lunar observation which can be complicated by weather. Saudi Arabia is the only country to use the Islamic calendar as its official secular calendar which has given the Saudis some leverage in standardization. The government has official sighting committees that for the , however they also use a mathematical system, Figure 3. The Hijri on the Microsoft the Umm al-Qura calendar which is used by electronics and software Phone versions of the calendar. It also allows the printing of calendars for the complete year in advance.

Persia

Iran and officially use the Jalālī both for secular functions and to mark their festivals and seasons. Its solar nature is a reflection of Zoroastrian heritage starting with the Avesta calendar which dates back to 600 BCE. The year is marked by the passage of the sun through the Spring vernal equinox, the point where the length of the day equals the length of the night. This event is marked by the festival of or new day, the celebrations of which can last for several weeks before and after and can include spring house cleaning, festivals, mass picnics, seed sprouting, and meals. Nowruz is a non-ethnic, non-religious festival that has been celebrated all the peoples of Persia and parts of for several millennia.

As it is a solar calendar, the year is governed by the Sun. The months and days move independently of the year. Nowruz occurs at the moment the old year ends and the new one begins, that day having two years. Because of this, the Jalālī calendar has no need of leap years or any other forms of adjustment. The Persians have long been adept mathematicians and have calculated the with great precision. The first six months each have 31 days and the last six 30 or 29 every 4 years for the last month. The difference in month length is to for the elliptical nature of the Sun’s orbit which causes the Sun to speed up and slow down in summer and winter.

The Jalālī calendar has three cousins, the Shenshai, the Kadmi or Quadmi, and the Fasli calendars, which are religious calendars used by the Zoroastrians (Parsi in India). These calendars are not true solar calendars, being linked to the day rather than the solar year. They also use the Egyptian month system of 30 day months and a 5 day stretch. Because of this they drift in relation to the solar year and rely on the addition of extra months to bring them back into alignment.

India

The history of Indian calendars is remarkably complex. Before the of 1957 there were as many as 30 calendars in use by , Buddhists, Parsi, Muslims, and Jainists marking cultural and religious festivals. Some were also used for secular purposes as well along with the Gregorian calendar later brought in by the British. The reform was an attempt to create a national calendar that was, if not acceptable then at least usable by the country as a whole. In addition to creating a new , the Calendar Reform Committee also created guidelines for the country’s religious calendars. Tabulations for religious holidays were created by the India Meteorological Department and published annually in the Indian Astronomical . Despite this effort, many variant calendars exist and the Gregorian calendar is in wide secular use, even within the government itself.

Figure 4. The The Indian National Calendar, sometimes called the Saka Calendar, is offset from the Gregorian calendar counting from the Saka era, which is considered to have started on the vernal equinox in 79 BCE. Because the year starts at the vernal equiox rather than the , the months are offset too. It uses a system of solar months similar to the Persian calendar. The first month Caitra has 30 or 31 days depending on leap years, the next five months have 31 days and the last six 30. It also uses a system of lunar months that are calculated from new moon to new moon and are named after the solar month they start in. Days are reckoned from sunrise to sunrise.

Buddhist Calendars Throughout Asia the Gregorian calendar has been adopted as the official calendar for secular day to day activities, although in some cases with some modifications, and yet most countries retain their traditional calendars for festivals and holidays which are often printed superimposed over the Gregorian. Traditional calendars generally follow one or both of two lines of influence, he or the Chinese calendar. The Buddhist calendar is a lunisolar calendar with months alternating 29 and 30 days, with an extra month added occasionally to keep things in line. All forms of the calendar are based on the Siddhanta, a remarkably accurate 3rd century Indian astronomical and mathematical text.

No one in Asia seriously uses anything but the Gregorian calendar for regular timekeeping these days, however there are several different versions of the calendar used traditionally to mark festivals and events from to . The primary differences are the names of days and months and the times in which months or days are added or subtracted to keep the lunar year in harmony with the solar year. Some calendars have more Hindu influence than others, using Hindu measurements and calculations. Asian calendars generally begin counting at as opposed to Western calendars which usually start at one. Buddhist epochs, the year they start counting their years from, vary between four different systems that range from 543 to 691 BCE depending on theological opinion, so there is variance in year from country to country.

The Chinese Calendar

The Chinese calendar is quite different and really very unique. The months are true lunar months, beginning and ending at midnight on the night of the as determined by Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing. There are 12, although every two or three years there may be an extra one as the lunar months catch up with the solar year. The extra month is named 十二月 shí'èryuè, same as month 12, so there can be two month 12’s in the year. The Chinese day on the other hand begins an earlier at 11 PM. There are only 12 Chinese in the day, numbered for the 12 of the Chinese . The day is also divided into 100 ke, which is 14.4 minutes long. The solar year is either measured from the day of the winter solstice or the spring equinox depending on the version of the calendar. Years are numbered regnally, which is to say they are numbed by era and then year. were most often labeled for the reigning emperor, however there are exceptions such as “The Years of the Republic”, which began in 1912. There is a continuously numbered years system as well which adds either 2637 or 2697 years to our Gregorian year, with an 4700 years ago. The difference has to do with the Emperor Huang-di (黄帝) who instituted the system in the 60th year of his reign. 60 is an important number as I will explain and was probably chosen on purpose, which leads some to feel that the epoch should be counted from the year of his ascendency to the throne instead of the year the calendar was instituted.

Incorporated into the calendar are several important cyclic systems of enumeration. In the stem-branch cycle, each year is counted using the 10 and 12 Earthly Branches. The Heavenly Stems are themselves enumerated by Yin Yang and the Five Elements. How this works is best shown using a chart. For the 10 Heavenly Stems each year is a Yin year or a Yang year. There is a five year cycle for the five elements, one each year, and the five directions. So any year might be Yang/ or Yin/. That's 2 times 5 possibilities or 10 years to complete each cycle for the 10 Heavenly Stems.

Yin and Chinese Japanese Japanese Viet- Wu Xing Stem Korean Yang (陰 kunyomi on'yomi namese (五行) 陽) 1 甲 jiǎ Kinoe kō 갑 (gap) giáp 陽 (yang) 2 乙 yǐ Kinoto otsu 을 (eul) ất 陰 (yin) 木 (wood) 東 East 3 丙 bǐng Hinoe hei 병 (byeong) bính 陽(yang) 4 丁 dīng Hinoto tei 정 (jeong) đinh 陰(yin) 火 (fire) 南 South 5 戊 wù Tsuchinoe bo 무 (mu) mậu 陽 (yang) 6 己 jǐ Tsuchinoto ki 기 (gi) kỷ 陰 (yin) 土 (earth) 中 Middle 7 庚 gēng Kanoe kō 경 (gyeong) canh 陽 (yang) Figure 5. The Ten Heavenly Stems 8 辛 xīn Kanoto shin 신 (sin) tân 陰 (yin) 金 (metal) 西 West 9 壬 rén Mizunoe 임 (im) nhâm 陽 (yang) 10 癸 guǐ Mizunoto ki 계 (gye) quý 陰 (yin) 水 () 北 North

The Earthly Branches are paired against the Heavenly Stems in a larger cycle that’s shown in the second chart. We are all very likely already aware of the names of the Earthly Branches. They are named after animals: , , , , , , , sheep, , rooters, dog, and . In combination with the five elements in the same manner as the Heavenly Stems they form a 60 year cycle.

Jiǎzǐ (甲子) Stem Gānzhī (干支) Year of the Continuous Gregorian sequence Branch 15 5/3 wùyín (戊寅) Earth Tiger 4635/4695 1998 16 6/4 jǐmăo (己卯) Earth Rabbit 4636/4696 1999 17 7/5 gēngchén (庚辰) Metal Dragon 4637/4697 2000 18 8/6 xīnsì (辛巳) Metal Snake 4638/4698 2001 19 9/7 rénwǔ (壬午) Water Horse 4639/4699 2002 20 10/8 guǐwèi (癸未) Water Sheep 4640/4700 2003 21 1/9 jiǎshēn (甲申) Wood Monkey 4641/4701 2004 22 2/10 yǐyǒu (乙酉) Wood 4642/4702 2005 23 3/11 bǐngxū (丙戌) Fire Dog 4643/4703 2006 24 4/12 dīnghài (丁亥) Fire Pig 4644/4704 2007 25 5/1 wùzǐ (戊子) Earth Rat 4645/4705 2008 26 6/2 jǐchǒu (己丑) Earth Ox 4646/4706 2009 27 7/3 gēngyín (庚寅) Metal Tiger 4647/4707 2010 28 8/4 xīnmăo (辛卯) Metal Rabbit 4648/4708 2011

Figure 6. The Earthly Branches Aside from the utter coolness of this calendar, its use throughout Asia, 5000 years of continuous literature and bureaucracy, and the odd menu, how is this important? The Stem Branch system is used as an important tool in creating enumerations. It isn’t just fanciful names. It’s used in much the same way we use letters of the . It’s used in filing cabinets, multiple choice exams and grades, chemical names, diseases, just about any place where we would use A, B, C. Of course they’re used to enumerate the days and months as well. The calendar is important culturally in a zone stretching from Mongolia to .

The

The Internet is smearing the boundaries of business across borders. With mergers and acquisitions boundaries and methods can become disjoint making it difficult for businesses to maintain clear understanding and control of and worth. We’ve been looking at civil and traditional calendars, which the pace of the day to day life of people and society, but there are other types of calendars that set the pace of business.

The Fiscal Year is the reporting period for businesses to report their annual statements, a list of financial activity, to their government for tax purposes. It is the closing of last year’s accounting books and the opening of the new year’s books. One might assume that generally that these boundaries would fall on calendar boundaries, but this isn’t the case. For many various reasons these reporting deadlines vary wildly across the Earth. For instance, in England the fiscal year was set to the old New Year ’s Day, Lady Day, the day of the enunciation when Mary was told she was going to have a baby. However, this fell on modern Julian March 25th. The Julian calendar was at the time 12 days off from the Sun and with the shift to the Gregorian calendar the date had to be shifted forward 12 days to April 6th, the current beginning of the English Fiscal Year. You can thank England that several of her former possessions, such as , , and India, still use this same day as well.

The fiscal year is import too because it’s often the time when businesses try to liquidate inventory so they won’t have to inventory and sometimes pay tax on. Another country’s fiscal year may provide purchasing advantage. The fiscal year cycle is like the ebb and flow of an annual and what flows out of one place flows into another.

July 1st to June 30th is the most popular fiscal year in the world, and is becoming an unofficial world standard. This is vitally important because many countries require company books to be in synch with their accounting year. In many countries though, the government fiscal year is a quarter off from the business fiscal year. This is because many governments need time to process the returns from business because they are spending money from the current year rather than more responsibly allowing a full year to determine their . We see this in countries like Japan, , and of course the . The United States shifted theirs to September 30th in 1976 in an effort to generate more immediate capital and balance their books.

Conclusion Measuring the cycles of the Earth has always been vital to our survival. All of our economies are food based, with agriculture being the foundation of GDP. Any coarse review of history will quickly reveal that civilization is directly related per capita food surplus. When that number drops, war inevitably follows. If it drops for too long, civilization begins to die off. Our tax systems and fiscal years are still based around the annual cycle of sowing and reaping.

How groups of people relate to these cycles is a measure of their identities as peoples. The dates that we collect identify our concerns, they identify the stories of our lives, they are lists that tell us who we are, they are the signature of our cultures. Their eradication is a sign that a culture has failed, that it has been erased. The Internet revolution is doing, in many cases, what no army or government has ever been able to do.

Even when they are gone, that they existed and that they were used cannot be ignored. They are woven into everything cultures create. If we want to retain those creations, then we are going to have to make accommodations in order to absorb them. Our applications are windows into databases that can come from all over the world and can contain data from not just any place, but any time as well.

Figure 1. Some Berber Calendars. Wikimedia Commons. Posted by vermondo. Figure 2. Figure 3. Hijri Calender 5. Pocketgear.com Figure 4. The Ten Heavenly Stems. Wikipedia, Chinese Calendar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar Figure 5. The Twelve Earthly Branches. Adapted from Wikipedia, Chinese Calendar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar

[1] Anthony Diller, Preecha Juntanamalaga. Thai Time. Australian National University, 2000. Australian National University, 2000

[2] Numeric Representation of Dates and Time. The International Organization for Standardization. ISO 8601: 2004. http://www.iso.org/iso/date_and_time_format

[3] Samuel Pepys. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Modern Library, 2001. ISBN: 978-0679642213

[4] Peter Meyers. The Julian and Gregorian Calendars. http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/cal_art.html

[5] Date and Time Notation by Country. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country

[6] NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. http://www.nist.gov

[7] The Calendar Zone. http://www.calendarzone.com/

[8] Genealogy in : Republican Calendar. http://www.francogene.com/search-fr/calrep.php

[9] H. E. Winlock. The Origin of the Ancient Egyptian Calendar. Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 83, 1940). http://books.google.com

[10] The of . Coptic Orthodox Church Network. http://www.copticchurch.net/easter.html

[11] Church Calendar. Orthodox Wiki. http://www.orthodoxwiki.org

[12] Masonic Calendar. Masonicworld.com. http://www.masonicworld.com/education/files/masoniccalender.htm

[13] M. Heydari-Malayeri. A concise review of the Iranian calendar. Paris Observatory, 2004. http://aramis.obspm.fr/~heydari/divers/ir-cal-eng.pdf

[14] Norouz (the beginning of the Iranian/Persian year) . Learn Persian. http://www.learn- persian.com/english/Norouz_the_beginning_of_the_Iranian_Persian_year.php

[15] L. E. Doggett. Calendars. http://astro.nmsu.edu/~lhuber/leaphist.html