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Very Short Introductions #133
The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction
Why do we measure time in the way that we do? Why is a week seven days long? At what point did minutes and seconds come into being? Why are some calendars lunar and some solar?
The organization of time into hours, days, months, and years seems immutable and universal, but is actually far more artificial than most people realize. For example, the French Revolution resulted in a restructuring of the French calendar, and the Soviet Union experimented with five and then six-day weeks.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens brings us this fascinating study of time using a range of examples from Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar's imposition of the Leap Year to the 1920's project for a fixed Easter. Those interested in time, history, and the development of the calendar will enjoy this absorbing exploration of an aspect of our lives that we all take for granted.
The organization of time into hours, days, months, and years seems immutable and universal, but is actually far more artificial than most people realize. For example, the French Revolution resulted in a restructuring of the French calendar, and the Soviet Union experimented with five and then six-day weeks.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens brings us this fascinating study of time using a range of examples from Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar's imposition of the Leap Year to the 1920's project for a fixed Easter. Those interested in time, history, and the development of the calendar will enjoy this absorbing exploration of an aspect of our lives that we all take for granted.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
40 people are currently reading
862 people want to read
About the author
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
19 books3 followersLeofranc Holford-Strevens (born 1946) is an English classical scholar and polymath, an authority on the works of Aulus Gellius, and a former reader for the Oxford University Press.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
August 19, 2015
Description: Why do we measure time in the way that we do? Why is a week seven days long? At what point did minutes and seconds come into being? Why are some calendars lunar and some solar? The organisation of time into hours, days, months and years seems immutable and universal, but is actually far more artificial than most people realise. The French Revolution resulted in a restructuring of the French calendar, and the Soviet Union experimented with five and then six-day weeks. Leofranc Holford-Strevens explores these questions using a range of fascinating examples from Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar's imposition of the Leap Year, to the 1920s' project for a fixed Easter.
North Korea celebrates new time zone, 'Pyongyang Time'
Inneresting, however somewhat dry.
3* Ancient Egypt
3* Paul
4* Witchcraft
3* The Book of Mormon
4* Druids
4* Forensic Psychology
3* Forensic Science
3* Socrates
3* The History of Time
North Korea celebrates new time zone, 'Pyongyang Time'
Inneresting, however somewhat dry.3* Ancient Egypt
3* Paul
4* Witchcraft
3* The Book of Mormon
4* Druids
4* Forensic Psychology
3* Forensic Science
3* Socrates
3* The History of Time
December 28, 2020
оксфордські «дуже короткі вступи» зручні, але іноді – як із цим, скажімо, – здається, що редактори просять авторів розповісти про щось коротко, не додаючи, що це має бути ще і ясно. а потім, коли автори приносять стислі головоломні тексти, уже якось незручно уточнювати технічне завдання, то їх так і публікують.
коли я розумію, про що пише голфорд-стревенс, читати його приємно; коли не розумію – ну, принаймні є враження, що сам він знає, що хоче сказати.
коли я розумію, про що пише голфорд-стревенс, читати його приємно; коли не розумію – ну, принаймні є враження, що сам він знає, що хоче сказати.
Read
March 30, 2014Actually the book should be called "The History of Calendars" because it basically shows the evolution of different date mechanisms, and how they changed over the centuries in the light through politics and religion.
March 16, 2010
It was informative, but not very fun, which is a lot different from the other Very Short Introduction that I read (Astronomy).
April 27, 2014
How do I tell you about today? As I write, the day is Saturday; the date is April 26, 2014, in the season called spring; the time at the moment is 11:35 AM. This way of seeing my place in time has been ingrained in me since my earliest days and seems indisputable. But in fact everything that you or I think is true about the time can be questioned or put in other terms. This delightful, often dizzying little book of 144 pages (including index) will make that abundantly clear.
The time I gave, for instance, was standardized time, the result of internationally recognized time zones as well as country-by-country practices regarding Daylight Saving Time, often called Summer Hours outside the United States. If I were to judge solely by the position of the sun, the time would've been about 10:39 AM. (At my location, it's about four minutes later than at the center of my time zone.) It's not hard to see the difficulty of trying to observe exact solar time for every location; if I proposed to call a friend in Boston at noon, we'd have to arrange whether I meant noon where I am or where he is—there's a difference of about 12 minutes, if I've reckoned right. Time zones eliminate that problem. Daylight Saving Time brings in a new one. As I learned one summer on a car trip, Arizona doesn't recognize it, as is true in Hawaii and some other regions. Holford-Strevens's book devotes little space to this aspect, but it's worth noting because time of day often carries more immediate importance to us than does any other element of time.
As for the season of spring, that's one of four that Western culture inherited from the ancient Romans; it's not spring on the other side of the equator from me. India observes six seasons, and different parts of the country reckon them differently. My view of New York City as having non-coat weather and coat weather resembles the practice among Germanic peoples, who recognized only the two seasons of summer and winter, whereas ancient Egypt had summer, winter, and flood.
What I think of as today's date comes from the calendar I use, which derives from the practice of Republican Rome as modified by Julius Caesar, by Pope Gregory XIII and other elements of the Christian church, and to some extent by astronomical practice and international agreements. It hasn't always been the case that days of the month are numbered sequentially. The Romans had a name for three days of the month—the Kalends (the first day), the Ides (determined by full moon, roughly the middle of the month), and the Nones (eight days before the Ides). All the other days were "named in relation to the next marker-day," as Holford-Strevens explains it. The second day of the month, then, would be called the sixth day before the Nones in 31-day months but the fourth before them in all other months. I'm glad we got rid of that.
Months have had and do still have other names, with other beginnings and other lengths. The same is true of years. These things depend on the calendar. Much of the book is devoted to surveying the differences, and I won't try to summarize them. It's worth noting that even the transitions between an existing system and a newer one could itself cause peculiarities. Consider this: in England the year 1751 began on March 25 (under a tradition by which years began in the spring), but it ended, in accordance with a reform, on December 31. So that year had only 282 days.
There have been countless other calendars, and at least a good handful are still in use. The book discusses the Jewish, Muslim, Greek, Gaulish, Hindu, Iranian, and Chinese calendars, along with the Mesoamerican calendar, which popular culture recently took to calling the Mayan calendar—you know, the one that supposedly predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. Also still in use are different choices of era—that is, the point in time from which years are counted. The Christian era, called the common era by some academics, is the one that calls this year 2014; it's good to learn—or to be reminded if you already know— that the Islamic world differs, among other ways, in observing its own era, reckoned from the beginning of the Hegira, on what's called in Christian terms July 16, 622.
Holford-Strevens devotes an entire chapter, out of only seven in the book, to the challenges of setting a date for Easter. One of his reasons for delving into it is that "the history of its calculation illustrates many complexities of time-reckoning." Boy, does it. The author begins by observing that Easter was originally connected with the Jewish Passover. According to the Gospel of St. John, Jesus was crucified on the Jewish date 14 Nisan, which was Passover in Biblical times (but not now). Early Christians chose to commemorate the crucifixion, which associated the death of Jesus with the Jewish sacrifice of the Paschal lamb on Passover. Later, however, it became the custom among Christians to celebrate the resurrection instead of the crucifixion. (How and when this observance came to be called Easter, a name borrowed from a Germanic festival, isn't discussed.) By the 3rd century, most Western churches had agreed that Easter should fall on the Sunday after the full moon of the year's first lunar month (with the year beginning in spring) and that this should be calculated without regard to Jewish practice. Eastern churches went another way, which sounds identical but wasn't. The book doesn't make clear how the two methods differed, but the modern consequence, which Holford-Strevens assumes we know, is that Orthodox Easter falls on a different date.
That's the start of the story. The main issue was to construct cyclical tables that would indicate the date of Easter ahead of time. Describing them occupies much of the chapter, and the work itself spread across centuries. Holford-Strevens goes into the details, but I won't; it's easier to relate some of the problems. One early table was such a mess that in some years it gave two Easters and in others none. Two competing methods clashed for a while in Northumbria, where a king raised in the practice of the British Isles married a princess who had been brought up in the Roman method of finding Easter; according to the Venerable Bede (in Holford-Strevens's words), "sometimes the King would be celebrating Easter while the Queen was still observing Palm Sunday." The Gregorian reforms of 1582 improved matters a lot, but some difficulties remained.
Deep, sometimes recondite knowledge sits alongside historical curiosities and info-bits in this book; some of what's here is a mix of both. Some examples: The French Revolution instituted a new calendar, which abolished traditional weeks—these were apparently regarded as Christian—and replaced them with a monthly cycle of three 10-day décades; it also imposed new names for the months and reset the entire calendar from September 22, 1792. (Some readers will have encountered a Republican-calendar date elsewhere. For instance, the title of one of Karl Marx's books, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, refers to 18 Brumaire, Year VIII. It translates to November 9, 1799, the day of Napoleon Bonaparte's coup.) The Soviets also tried to abolish traditional weeks, beginning with a new calendar in 1929. This is a case where the weakest triumphed over the strong; as Holford-Strevens tells it, the peasantry sabotaged the reform well enough that in 1940 Stalin gave in and restored the seven-day week. Maybe the most charming note in the whole book is this: In Christ Church, Oxford, which otherwise observes standard time—that is, Greenwich time—you're not counted tardy unless you're late by local solar time, which gives you five minutes' leeway.
The book uses many specialized terms, such as embolism, epact, feria, intercalation, and lune. These are all explained when introduced (as I recall) and appear in a glossary in the back, but it can be hard to keep them straight. The author's approach to making his text concise—remember that this is intended to be a "very short introduction"—often results in chunky summaries where a longer explanation would've been more clear. On the other hand, the story progresses smoothly and sensibly, from relatively simply matters of day and time all the way to the issue of eras.
The time I gave, for instance, was standardized time, the result of internationally recognized time zones as well as country-by-country practices regarding Daylight Saving Time, often called Summer Hours outside the United States. If I were to judge solely by the position of the sun, the time would've been about 10:39 AM. (At my location, it's about four minutes later than at the center of my time zone.) It's not hard to see the difficulty of trying to observe exact solar time for every location; if I proposed to call a friend in Boston at noon, we'd have to arrange whether I meant noon where I am or where he is—there's a difference of about 12 minutes, if I've reckoned right. Time zones eliminate that problem. Daylight Saving Time brings in a new one. As I learned one summer on a car trip, Arizona doesn't recognize it, as is true in Hawaii and some other regions. Holford-Strevens's book devotes little space to this aspect, but it's worth noting because time of day often carries more immediate importance to us than does any other element of time.
As for the season of spring, that's one of four that Western culture inherited from the ancient Romans; it's not spring on the other side of the equator from me. India observes six seasons, and different parts of the country reckon them differently. My view of New York City as having non-coat weather and coat weather resembles the practice among Germanic peoples, who recognized only the two seasons of summer and winter, whereas ancient Egypt had summer, winter, and flood.
What I think of as today's date comes from the calendar I use, which derives from the practice of Republican Rome as modified by Julius Caesar, by Pope Gregory XIII and other elements of the Christian church, and to some extent by astronomical practice and international agreements. It hasn't always been the case that days of the month are numbered sequentially. The Romans had a name for three days of the month—the Kalends (the first day), the Ides (determined by full moon, roughly the middle of the month), and the Nones (eight days before the Ides). All the other days were "named in relation to the next marker-day," as Holford-Strevens explains it. The second day of the month, then, would be called the sixth day before the Nones in 31-day months but the fourth before them in all other months. I'm glad we got rid of that.
Months have had and do still have other names, with other beginnings and other lengths. The same is true of years. These things depend on the calendar. Much of the book is devoted to surveying the differences, and I won't try to summarize them. It's worth noting that even the transitions between an existing system and a newer one could itself cause peculiarities. Consider this: in England the year 1751 began on March 25 (under a tradition by which years began in the spring), but it ended, in accordance with a reform, on December 31. So that year had only 282 days.
There have been countless other calendars, and at least a good handful are still in use. The book discusses the Jewish, Muslim, Greek, Gaulish, Hindu, Iranian, and Chinese calendars, along with the Mesoamerican calendar, which popular culture recently took to calling the Mayan calendar—you know, the one that supposedly predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. Also still in use are different choices of era—that is, the point in time from which years are counted. The Christian era, called the common era by some academics, is the one that calls this year 2014; it's good to learn—or to be reminded if you already know— that the Islamic world differs, among other ways, in observing its own era, reckoned from the beginning of the Hegira, on what's called in Christian terms July 16, 622.
Holford-Strevens devotes an entire chapter, out of only seven in the book, to the challenges of setting a date for Easter. One of his reasons for delving into it is that "the history of its calculation illustrates many complexities of time-reckoning." Boy, does it. The author begins by observing that Easter was originally connected with the Jewish Passover. According to the Gospel of St. John, Jesus was crucified on the Jewish date 14 Nisan, which was Passover in Biblical times (but not now). Early Christians chose to commemorate the crucifixion, which associated the death of Jesus with the Jewish sacrifice of the Paschal lamb on Passover. Later, however, it became the custom among Christians to celebrate the resurrection instead of the crucifixion. (How and when this observance came to be called Easter, a name borrowed from a Germanic festival, isn't discussed.) By the 3rd century, most Western churches had agreed that Easter should fall on the Sunday after the full moon of the year's first lunar month (with the year beginning in spring) and that this should be calculated without regard to Jewish practice. Eastern churches went another way, which sounds identical but wasn't. The book doesn't make clear how the two methods differed, but the modern consequence, which Holford-Strevens assumes we know, is that Orthodox Easter falls on a different date.
That's the start of the story. The main issue was to construct cyclical tables that would indicate the date of Easter ahead of time. Describing them occupies much of the chapter, and the work itself spread across centuries. Holford-Strevens goes into the details, but I won't; it's easier to relate some of the problems. One early table was such a mess that in some years it gave two Easters and in others none. Two competing methods clashed for a while in Northumbria, where a king raised in the practice of the British Isles married a princess who had been brought up in the Roman method of finding Easter; according to the Venerable Bede (in Holford-Strevens's words), "sometimes the King would be celebrating Easter while the Queen was still observing Palm Sunday." The Gregorian reforms of 1582 improved matters a lot, but some difficulties remained.
Deep, sometimes recondite knowledge sits alongside historical curiosities and info-bits in this book; some of what's here is a mix of both. Some examples: The French Revolution instituted a new calendar, which abolished traditional weeks—these were apparently regarded as Christian—and replaced them with a monthly cycle of three 10-day décades; it also imposed new names for the months and reset the entire calendar from September 22, 1792. (Some readers will have encountered a Republican-calendar date elsewhere. For instance, the title of one of Karl Marx's books, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, refers to 18 Brumaire, Year VIII. It translates to November 9, 1799, the day of Napoleon Bonaparte's coup.) The Soviets also tried to abolish traditional weeks, beginning with a new calendar in 1929. This is a case where the weakest triumphed over the strong; as Holford-Strevens tells it, the peasantry sabotaged the reform well enough that in 1940 Stalin gave in and restored the seven-day week. Maybe the most charming note in the whole book is this: In Christ Church, Oxford, which otherwise observes standard time—that is, Greenwich time—you're not counted tardy unless you're late by local solar time, which gives you five minutes' leeway.
The book uses many specialized terms, such as embolism, epact, feria, intercalation, and lune. These are all explained when introduced (as I recall) and appear in a glossary in the back, but it can be hard to keep them straight. The author's approach to making his text concise—remember that this is intended to be a "very short introduction"—often results in chunky summaries where a longer explanation would've been more clear. On the other hand, the story progresses smoothly and sensibly, from relatively simply matters of day and time all the way to the issue of eras.
Read
February 24, 2018Did not finish – σελίδα 97 από 169.
Βαρετό και μπερδεμένο. Ο συγγραφέας μού θύμισε ένα σωρό καθηγητές μου στο Πανεπιστήμιο: προσπαθούν να διδάξουν, πεπεισμένοι ότι αυτά που λένε τα καταλαβαίνουν οι άλλοι, διότι, αφού τα καταλαβαίνω εγώ πώς μπορεί να μην τα καταλαβαίνεις εσύ.
Βαρετό και μπερδεμένο. Ο συγγραφέας μού θύμισε ένα σωρό καθηγητές μου στο Πανεπιστήμιο: προσπαθούν να διδάξουν, πεπεισμένοι ότι αυτά που λένε τα καταλαβαίνουν οι άλλοι, διότι, αφού τα καταλαβαίνω εγώ πώς μπορεί να μην τα καταλαβαίνεις εσύ.
December 15, 2020
A detail on historical time calculations and allocations...
November 15, 2023
Svår och tråkig. Vill dock veta mer om sovjets försök att avskaffa helgen och istället ge alla arbetare olika vilodagar för att Maximera Produktion
December 22, 2017
بعد قراءة هذا الكتاب سوف تنتبه ولفترة من الوقت الى التاريخ الذي تدونه فعام 2017 هو مبني على التقويم الغريفوري المستخدم عالميا
الا ان هذا التقويم ليس الوحيد الموجود في العالم اليوم ولا حتى الوحيد الذي وجد في الماضي
فرقم السنة ومن اي يوم تبدا و عدد الشهور ضمن السنة و عدد الايام ضمن الشهر وحتى في اي ساعة يبدا اليوم والى كم قسم يقسم اليوم كان مختلفا جدا ضمن ثقافات العالم وفي اليونان كانت لكل مدينة نظام تقويم مختلف
ان الاسباب الدينية والسياسية لعبت دورا كبيرا في تحديد وتشكيل انظمة التقويم حول العالم فعي�� الفصح وميلاد السيد المسيح وهجرة النبي محمد كلها كانت عوامل مهمة في وضع وتتغيير انظمة التقاويم
بشكل اساسي كان هناك تقاويم شمسية تعتمد على السنة الشمسية او دورة للارض حول المشس وهناك التقاويم القمرية التي تعتمد على تكرارات لدوران القمر حول الارض والسنة القمرية اقصر من السنة الشمسية كما هو معروف
من الامور الطريفة انه في التقويم الغريفوري الحالي لاتوجد السنة 0 فالسنة 1 قبل الميلاد تتبعها 1 بعد الميلاد
من الامور الهامة فعلا هو ان البابليين و المصريين القدماء كانو متقدمين في علم الفلك
ولعله من المهم لنا نحن كسوريين ان نعرف لماذا اسماء الاشهر لدينا مختلفة عن اسمائها العالمية او حتى في بقية الدول العربية والسبب هو اننا نستخدم الاسماء البابلية للاشهر
الكتاب الحقيقة يحتاج لجهد لمتابعة الكمية الضخمة من المعلومات والحسابات وانظمة التقويم المطروحة
الا ان هذا التقويم ليس الوحيد الموجود في العالم اليوم ولا حتى الوحيد الذي وجد في الماضي
فرقم السنة ومن اي يوم تبدا و عدد الشهور ضمن السنة و عدد الايام ضمن الشهر وحتى في اي ساعة يبدا اليوم والى كم قسم يقسم اليوم كان مختلفا جدا ضمن ثقافات العالم وفي اليونان كانت لكل مدينة نظام تقويم مختلف
ان الاسباب الدينية والسياسية لعبت دورا كبيرا في تحديد وتشكيل انظمة التقويم حول العالم فعي�� الفصح وميلاد السيد المسيح وهجرة النبي محمد كلها كانت عوامل مهمة في وضع وتتغيير انظمة التقاويم
بشكل اساسي كان هناك تقاويم شمسية تعتمد على السنة الشمسية او دورة للارض حول المشس وهناك التقاويم القمرية التي تعتمد على تكرارات لدوران القمر حول الارض والسنة القمرية اقصر من السنة الشمسية كما هو معروف
من الامور الطريفة انه في التقويم الغريفوري الحالي لاتوجد السنة 0 فالسنة 1 قبل الميلاد تتبعها 1 بعد الميلاد
من الامور الهامة فعلا هو ان البابليين و المصريين القدماء كانو متقدمين في علم الفلك
ولعله من المهم لنا نحن كسوريين ان نعرف لماذا اسماء الاشهر لدينا مختلفة عن اسمائها العالمية او حتى في بقية الدول العربية والسبب هو اننا نستخدم الاسماء البابلية للاشهر
الكتاب الحقيقة يحتاج لجهد لمتابعة الكمية الضخمة من المعلومات والحسابات وانظمة التقويم المطروحة
February 10, 2020
I feel that one star is generous for this book, but if I award it no stars then it just looks like I've forgotten to tick the box. Ah well, never mind.
This is not a history of time. It has nothing to do with time. It is merely a history of the ways that people have labelled time. It's overly complicated language makes it a real pain to read. Even the glossary; which is supposed to explain things, right? contains so many complicated words that I found it to be useless. In fact, the whole book was useless for me; I learned nothing of value
Don't read this, full stop.
This is not a history of time. It has nothing to do with time. It is merely a history of the ways that people have labelled time. It's overly complicated language makes it a real pain to read. Even the glossary; which is supposed to explain things, right? contains so many complicated words that I found it to be useless. In fact, the whole book was useless for me; I learned nothing of value
Don't read this, full stop.
October 14, 2017
Fascinating but somewhat technical introduction to a complex subject: how we measure time. Most of the book is concerned with the historical development of calendars, including an entire chapter on Easter as a case study of the complexities of calendrical calculations.
July 22, 2017
This introduction is packed with information and, more especifically, math, numbers, and calculations. In the past, there used to be tons of different calendars, each created by a different culture, such is its artificiality. Today, for practical reasons, most people follow the Gregorian calendar.
April 24, 2022
Really enjoyed the first few chapters, about the origins of days and weeks, but once we got into years and dating under competing calendars my eyes just glazed over….
September 10, 2017
How make your subject boring: A Very Short Introduction
June 12, 2020
Very misleading title, but accurate description. Unfortunately I just picked it up based on the title, wanting a quick primer on the history of thought about time. I'd recently finished James Gleick's Time Travel and was exploring a few ideas contrasting the different philosophies of time based on the cultural environment, for which I needed pointers to big names to compare, like St.Augustine and Parmenides and Newton etc. This is not that book. This is the history of calendars. It starts off interesting, and then gets mired in a sludge of supremely boring particulars that I'm sure would be of mindblowing interest to obsessives but certainly not to some filthy casual like me who'd pick up something with the words very, short, and introduction. From the section on Easter onwards, the reading got faster and faster as I bothered with less and less of the detail.
Notes
Solon saw time as judge. Court of time. Link with the post-bicameral mind of Ancient Greece and the need for Solon to abstract principles of justice away from the erstwhile divine voices of god.
Germanic/Celtics counted not days but nights. Same with hotel booking. Fortnight = 14 nights
Day starts with midnight, noon, or dawn like morgen, tomorrow, manana. Hence noontime nap is siesta, 6th hour.
Lunar calebdar, synodic for Greek conjunction, lunation full moon to full moon. Every few years add a month to match solar calendar, intercalation or embolism.
Count waxing waning moon dates separately. 1-15, 15-1 backwards
Solar calendar. 12*30. 5 extra epagomenal days. Egyptian 'days upon the year'.
Intercalation was unlucky so didn't happen during stressful times like punic war, gallic war, Caesar civil war. 46bc Caesar finally free to take one time correction of 445 day year. Added 10 days to 29 day months made year 365. Quinctilus (5th month, from march) became Julius.
8bc, Augustus his heir defeated Antony Cleopatra so renamed sextilius to August.
Julian calendar extra 1 day per 131yrs by vernal equinox count, used for Easter. Gregory xiii made bull that suppressed 3 leap days per 400 years. Non catholics took as much as 1968 to move from Julian.
Bourgeois idlers sat sun banoshed by Soviet Union. 5 day weeks, everyday 1/5th would be on leave. Generous leave, continuous production. But just disrupted family religious life. Peasants wanted Sunday. Stalin eventually reintroduced 7 day week in 1940
How to count year? Eponymous: year Gaius became consul. Ephor of Sparta. Archon of Athens. Difficult to compare.
Regnal: needed to know chronology of kings. Survived till 1962 in UK.
Cycles, 4yr Olympiad. 12yr animal cycle in China
Notes
Solon saw time as judge. Court of time. Link with the post-bicameral mind of Ancient Greece and the need for Solon to abstract principles of justice away from the erstwhile divine voices of god.
Germanic/Celtics counted not days but nights. Same with hotel booking. Fortnight = 14 nights
Day starts with midnight, noon, or dawn like morgen, tomorrow, manana. Hence noontime nap is siesta, 6th hour.
Lunar calebdar, synodic for Greek conjunction, lunation full moon to full moon. Every few years add a month to match solar calendar, intercalation or embolism.
Count waxing waning moon dates separately. 1-15, 15-1 backwards
Solar calendar. 12*30. 5 extra epagomenal days. Egyptian 'days upon the year'.
Intercalation was unlucky so didn't happen during stressful times like punic war, gallic war, Caesar civil war. 46bc Caesar finally free to take one time correction of 445 day year. Added 10 days to 29 day months made year 365. Quinctilus (5th month, from march) became Julius.
8bc, Augustus his heir defeated Antony Cleopatra so renamed sextilius to August.
Julian calendar extra 1 day per 131yrs by vernal equinox count, used for Easter. Gregory xiii made bull that suppressed 3 leap days per 400 years. Non catholics took as much as 1968 to move from Julian.
Bourgeois idlers sat sun banoshed by Soviet Union. 5 day weeks, everyday 1/5th would be on leave. Generous leave, continuous production. But just disrupted family religious life. Peasants wanted Sunday. Stalin eventually reintroduced 7 day week in 1940
How to count year? Eponymous: year Gaius became consul. Ephor of Sparta. Archon of Athens. Difficult to compare.
Regnal: needed to know chronology of kings. Survived till 1962 in UK.
Cycles, 4yr Olympiad. 12yr animal cycle in China
March 4, 2024
Leofranc Holtford-Strevens’ History of Time is exactly what the title suggests, and should not be confused with Stephen Hawking’s much more compelling ‘A Brief History of Time’. Holtford-Strevens laboriously presents every known historical calendar and measurement of day, chock-full of fun facts, such as the modern definition of a second being ‘the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom’.
The book’s sections cover the history of the day, the month, the hour, the minute, seasons, years, and eras, adhering very strictly to the historical record. It reads like a laundry list of encyclopedia entries, steering clear of any philosophical or socio-political dissections of what these units might imply.
Despite it’s short length, it’s very dense and thorough, maybe overly packed with ecclesiastical debates over Easter’s timing and endless variations in leap year adjustments. I wish the author had ventured deeper into how the reification of calendar events correspond with power and influence over our perception of reality.
Time is an endlessly fascinating topic, and examining how humanity’s brightest minds have grappled with its’ concept and methods of measurement for millennia should be very compelling. However, the books’ presentation just about drains all the fun from it. Learning about the different divisions of time and the introduction of time zones were interesting chapters, but the writing style is unbearably dry. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a deeply interesting subject presented in such a deathly boring way.
The book’s sections cover the history of the day, the month, the hour, the minute, seasons, years, and eras, adhering very strictly to the historical record. It reads like a laundry list of encyclopedia entries, steering clear of any philosophical or socio-political dissections of what these units might imply.
Despite it’s short length, it’s very dense and thorough, maybe overly packed with ecclesiastical debates over Easter’s timing and endless variations in leap year adjustments. I wish the author had ventured deeper into how the reification of calendar events correspond with power and influence over our perception of reality.
Time is an endlessly fascinating topic, and examining how humanity’s brightest minds have grappled with its’ concept and methods of measurement for millennia should be very compelling. However, the books’ presentation just about drains all the fun from it. Learning about the different divisions of time and the introduction of time zones were interesting chapters, but the writing style is unbearably dry. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a deeply interesting subject presented in such a deathly boring way.
March 25, 2025
A good read but I think the title of this small--in size; not content--book would be more aptly entitled, "The History of Calendars." But I guess its current title might snag more buyers in book shops, eh?
(I wanted to learn more about timing of the internet, our global GPS system, computer chips and other electronic technologies. There is none of that in this book.)
Still, I learned a lot of interesting calendar details by reading this.
What a mess in 18th century Europe as various factions attempted to sort out their interpretation of what the correct date for Easter should be! The author does an even-handed job at presenting the central point of calendar history: the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For example, Martin Luther wanted to have Easter pinned to a fixed date like Christmas. His idea never took wing given Scriptural accounts of our Lord's rising from the dead on the first day of the week, which is still classically regarded as Sunday.
You'll also learn a lot about how other cultures each decide to finalize their own dating system and express it in the yearly calendar they prefer to use.
(I wanted to learn more about timing of the internet, our global GPS system, computer chips and other electronic technologies. There is none of that in this book.)
Still, I learned a lot of interesting calendar details by reading this.
What a mess in 18th century Europe as various factions attempted to sort out their interpretation of what the correct date for Easter should be! The author does an even-handed job at presenting the central point of calendar history: the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For example, Martin Luther wanted to have Easter pinned to a fixed date like Christmas. His idea never took wing given Scriptural accounts of our Lord's rising from the dead on the first day of the week, which is still classically regarded as Sunday.
You'll also learn a lot about how other cultures each decide to finalize their own dating system and express it in the yearly calendar they prefer to use.
September 8, 2021
I have no idea what I just read. I’m not sure I’m the right audience for this book but the book is titled a very short introduction: the history of time. Which means the readers must be expecting to know the “introduction” of time. I have no doubt leofranc must be a great scholar and must have done a lot of research prior to writing this book but he assumes the reader already knows everything… the terminology and jargons used, the name of the months and everything is completely new and no! you cannot expect the reader to know this….. I don’t know anything about Jewish calendar or Egyptian calendar so where is this assumption coming from… an over complicated calculations of numbers and years just made my head spin… an absolute impossible read!!! My only reason for finishing this book was that it made me sleepy after a single page so I used it as a sleeping pill.
May 22, 2023
یک ستاره به خاطر این هست که دیگه کمتر از این نمیشه ستاره داد
خود کتاب واقعا ارزش خوندن نداره، حداقل از نگاه من
عنوان کتاب تاریخچه زمان هست، ولی شما با تاریخچه تقویم ها مواجه میشید
در حالی که موضوع تقویم در فرهنگ های مختلف خود اش موضوع جالبی هست، بخش بسیار عمده کتاب فقط تقویم مسیحی رو پوشش میده و صفحات بسیاری به نحوه محاسبه ایستر مربوط میشه، که فکر میکنم برای بسیاری از خوانندگان در کشورهای مسیحی هم باید موضوع کم اهمیتی باشه و حجم بسیار کمتری مطلب براش واقعا کافیه
مترجم هم خود اش صلاح دیده یک فصل به کتاب اضافه کنه
خب چرا مترجم محترم اون فصل رو به عنوان یک مجلد تالیفی ارائه نکرده، این دیگه چطور ترجمه ای هست. حالا دیده بودیم یک مقدمه یا موخره گسترده، ولی اینکه یک فصل به کتاب اضافه بیشه دیگه احتمالا از ابداعات این مترجم هست
خود کتاب واقعا ارزش خوندن نداره، حداقل از نگاه من
عنوان کتاب تاریخچه زمان هست، ولی شما با تاریخچه تقویم ها مواجه میشید
در حالی که موضوع تقویم در فرهنگ های مختلف خود اش موضوع جالبی هست، بخش بسیار عمده کتاب فقط تقویم مسیحی رو پوشش میده و صفحات بسیاری به نحوه محاسبه ایستر مربوط میشه، که فکر میکنم برای بسیاری از خوانندگان در کشورهای مسیحی هم باید موضوع کم اهمیتی باشه و حجم بسیار کمتری مطلب براش واقعا کافیه
مترجم هم خود اش صلاح دیده یک فصل به کتاب اضافه کنه
خب چرا مترجم محترم اون فصل رو به عنوان یک مجلد تالیفی ارائه نکرده، این دیگه چطور ترجمه ای هست. حالا دیده بودیم یک مقدمه یا موخره گسترده، ولی اینکه یک فصل به کتاب اضافه بیشه دیگه احتمالا از ابداعات این مترجم هست
April 7, 2020
A bit too dry. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of references to names and dates in such a tiny book. Although it is mesmerizing the amount of knowledge the author demonstrates to posess, the book leaves the reader with the impression that a lot of it is dispensible for a real understanding of the history of time.
However, it contains some good references to other books of the same domain, and gives an overall impression on the complicate and intricate evolution of the art of counting and keeping track of time.
However, it contains some good references to other books of the same domain, and gives an overall impression on the complicate and intricate evolution of the art of counting and keeping track of time.
February 16, 2021
5/5
A difficult, but riveting, book full of must-know nuggets about the history of time reckoning, evolving and conflicting historical definitions of minutes, hours, weeks, months and days across various cultures, and calendrical systems. The chapter on Easter and how there is still contention over "moveable feasts," which occur on different days every year, in different Christian denominational systems is a gem.
A difficult, but riveting, book full of must-know nuggets about the history of time reckoning, evolving and conflicting historical definitions of minutes, hours, weeks, months and days across various cultures, and calendrical systems. The chapter on Easter and how there is still contention over "moveable feasts," which occur on different days every year, in different Christian denominational systems is a gem.
August 19, 2017
It wasn't exactly what I expected. I simply picked this book up because I thought it would be about time from a the perspective of physics, but it was about the history of how time has been recorded. There are a lot of eras and terms to keep track off. But it is an interesting knowledge to have, how complicated it is to get the date correct.
August 7, 2025
Terrible, terrible writing: scattered ideas expressed in tortured prose. Information is locked so completely within sentences by chains of clumsy syntax and padlocks of unarticulated concepts so as to render the book unreadable. Explaining complex ideas requires clarity of mind and clarity of prose; this has neither. Useless.
December 15, 2018
This is a short book. This reads more like a textbook. The book is very well researched with a huge number of dates, facts and references. I was looking for something that had more insight into the cultural impact of time.
July 8, 2021
I’ve now read several of these very short introductions and this is this far my least favorite. The writing is relatively dry and uninteresting, and after reading the whole thing I don’t feel like I learned a whole lot.
June 21, 2022
A lot of information but not cataloged in a particularly engaging way. Good for research purposes and interesting in spurts but not something I'd recommend outside of getting a compendium of small, interesting facts in a relatively condensed package and mostly reasonably organized.
August 21, 2017
rather dry but broadly researched
August 30, 2021
Alt for mange informationer og for lidt pædagogik, så ikke voldsomt hyggelig læsning men ønsker man oprigtigt denne viden får man i hvertfald en masse...
February 12, 2022
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November 16, 2022
Wow, thinking this world be an interesting subject was completely erroneous.
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