Synopsis
When is Hanukkah this year? When is Lupercalia, or Easter, or Midsummer’s Eve? When is your birthday? Figuring out when big events happen is incredibly important, and humans have been doing it for a long time. But while we can see some similarities in the process of calendar evolution, many civilizations had very different ways of conceptualizing and measuring time. Join Em and Dr. Jesse for a discussion of non-Roman calendars!
Notes
0/ Check out the Nerd and Tie podcast network! Official announcement here.
1/ A lot of Mayans live in Yucatán in Mexico. Between 1847–1933, the Mayan fought a long and bloody war against the government of Mexico, and for a while controlled an independent state. Eventually they won the right to break up some of the haciendas, making it a fairly successful indigenous land movement. Now in Yucatán, a lot of the land is collectively owned/managed by the Maya.
2/ St Patrick will be coming up in the future! His episode has been recorded.
3/ Sir Capricorn’s name turns out to be Sesame. He is amazing!
4/ Gobekli Tepe (settled roughly 9500 BCE)
5/ Wurdi Youang (Australia)
6/ Warren Field (Scotland)
7/ Hawaii
9/ Babylonian calendar (from the 2nd millennium BCE). See Lis Brack-Bernsen’s “The 360-Day Year in Mesopotamia”
The early astronomical text known as MUL.APIN (from 1000 BCE).
10/ Ancient Egyptian calendar! And some fun artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
11/ Mayan calendar! Very intriguing.
Here is the film 2012 which posits many incorrect things, not just about the Mayan calendar.
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Great Episode #97! Calendars #1: NON-Roman! That name itself states an organizing perspective, like NON-Fiction. But there were so many wonderful calendars! Just as our Gregorian calendar is RECENT, as Dr Jesse said, do we know when each ancient group started using its calendar that Dr Jesse described: Aborigine, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hawaiian, Mayan, for instance? The Jewish calendar was based on adding up all the ages in the scripture to get back to Creation or was that apocryphal? They could have started their counting based on the oral scripture, before the written Torah. Dr Jesse pointed out the groups that had been “counting a long time.” True! But for the Jews, possibly not as far back as 5780+ years ago or is that what you meant? In Mesopotamia. could they have borrowed what the Egyptians were doing? The same sun and moon cycles inspired so many different versions. All are good, but the Mayans are AWESOME for their cyclic long-view, a combined periodic system that can repeat to Infinity. Thanks for another terrific episode. From your wrap-up, you intimated that the Romans’ hubris made themselves the measure of all things, the calendar included. Looking forward to Episode #98: Calendars #2!