e-book (for free circulation)

Origin of Time
& Calendar

By

Tamarapu Sampath Kumaran

About the Author:

Mr T Sampath Kumaran is a freelance writer. He regularly contributes

articles on Management, Business, Ancient Temples, and Temple
Architecture to many leading Dailies and Magazines.

His articles are popular in “The Young World section” of THE HINDU
His e-books on nature, environment and different cultures of people around
the world are educative and of special interest to the young.

He was associated in the renovation and production of two Documentary

films on Nava Tirupathi Temples, and Tirukkurungudi Temple in
Tamilnadu.

Acknowledgement:

I wish to express my gratitude to the authors from whose works I gathered

the details for this book, and Courtesy, Google for some of the photographs.

Tamarapu Sampath Kumaran

 Time & Calendar

Celestial bodies, the sun, moon, planets, and stars have provided us a
reference for measuring the passage of time throughout our existence.
Ancient civilizations relied upon the apparent motion of these bodies
through the sky to determine seasons, months, and years.

Earth spins on its axis. As it spins around we get daylight and darkness. This
pattern of daylight and darkness repeats itself each time the earth completes
a full turn on its axis. Since different parts of the earth face the sun at
different times, there are different day times on earth. One day is based on
this repeating pattern of the spin of the earth.

The moon orbits the earth. Its appearance in the sky, viewed from earth
changes from one day to the other. This pattern repeats itself each time the
moon passes in its orbit between the sun and earth. One month is based on
this repeating pattern. The word month comes from moon and both are
believed to come from the same Indo-European root word which means to
measure. The waning and waxing of the moon is calculated to be about
twenty nine or thirty days from one new moon to the other.

Like the Moon, Earth orbits the sun. As it goes on its orbit around the sun
we pass from one season to the next. The pattern of the seasons repeats itself
each time earth starts a new orbit. One year is based on this repeating
pattern.

The system of dividing the day and night into twenty-four parts comes from
the Egyptians. At first they divided the night into twelve parts, each marked
by the appearance of a particular star or constellation on the Eastern horizon.
The hours of the day were numbered from one to ten according to the
position of the Sun, the twilight hours one at the dawn and another at dusk
were at first reckoned separately, and eventually they were counted with the
daylight hours.

The day is divided into 24 smaller parts called hours, as 12 hours of day time
and 12 hours of night time. Each hour is divided into 60 minutes and again
to 60 seconds a minute.

Babylonian Calendar

The earliest Egyptian calendar was based on the moon's cycles, but later the
Egyptians realized that the "Dog Star" in Canis Major, which is now called
Sirius, rose next to the sun every 365 days, about the time, when the annual
inundation of the Nile began. Based on this knowledge, they devised a 365-
day calendar.
One year is also linked to the season. The pattern of the seasons repeats itself
in just about 365-1/4 day. Because it is not a whole number of days one
calendar year is calculated as 365 days. Once in four years it is calculated as
366 days and the year is called leap year. The year is again divided into 12
months, and this extra day is added to the month of February during the leap
year.

During, 45 BC the Roman emperor Julius Caesar introduced the Julian

calendar, beginning with March.

Julius Caesar Pope Grerory XIII

Our calendar being followed till date is called Gregorian calendar worked
out later by Pope Gregory XIII., starting the months from January.

The Romans who started the calendar named the months.

January was named after Roman God “Janus”.

February after the Roman festival “Februa”.

March after “Mars” the Roman God of war.

April after the Latin word APERIRE, which means open. In Rome many
flower buds started to appear in April.
 May after the Roman Goddess of growth “Maia”, since spring
is the time of growth

June after the Goddess of marriage, “Juno”.

July in honour of “Julius Caesar”.

August after Roman emperor “Augustus”.

September, October, November and December comes from the Latin words
meaning seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the year, based on the
year beginning with March.
Though the lengths of a month and of a year were roughly governed by the
moon and the sun, the week had seven days by chance. The week was kept
as seven days as each day was devoted to the worship of a different heavenly
body. The names of the day in a week come from Roman names after Sun,
Moon and the planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Later the
four names have been changed as Tuesday after TIU the God of war and
justice. Wednesday, was named after God Woden, Thursday, after God Thor
and Friday after Goddess Frigg.

Hindus Muslims, Jews and Buddhists have their own calendars.

Many religions and tribes have their own calendars depending on their faith.

Hindu calendar used in ancient times has undergone many changes in the
process of regionalization, and today there are several regional Indian
calendars. Most of these calendars are inherited from a system first
enunciated in Vedas, standardised in Surya Sidhanta, which was
subsequently reformed by astronomers Aryabhatta, Varahamihira and
Bhaskara. Hindu calendar is based on the movement of Moon. A lunar
month has 30 lunar days and is measured from new Moon to the next new
Moon. Each Lunar day is called a Tithi. There are 15 Tithis in the dark and
15 in the bright half of the month

The Islamic calendar or Muslim calendar also called Hijri calendar is based
on 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days, and used by Muslims
everywhere to determine the proper day on which to celebrate Islamic holy
days and festivals. The first year was the year during which the “Hijra” the
emigration of Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina occurred. The
Moslem calendar months travel through the seasons. Rabia I and Rabia II
mean the first and second spring months, and Ramadan comes during the hot
months.

The Hebrew calendar or Jewish calendar is used by Jews to reckon the

Jewish New Year and dates for Jewish holidays. The principles of the
Hebrew calendar are found in the Torah which contains several calendar-
related commandments, including God's commandment during the exodus
from Egypt to fix the month of Nisan as the first month of the year, in the
6th century, including the adoption of Babylonian names for the months

The Buddhist calendar is used in the mainland of Southeast Asian countries

and Sri Lanka, having months that are alternately 29 and 30 days, with an
intercalated day and a 30-day month added at regular intervals. All of its
forms are based on the original 3rd-century Surya Siddhanta.

Quest to determine time:

With the need for knowing the time of day, the Egyptians formally divided
their day into parts something like our hours. They built a slender, tapering;
four-sided monument called Obelisks. During the day the moving shadows
within, formed a kind of sundial enabling citizens to partition the day into
two parts by indicating noon. They also showed the year's longest and
shortest days when the shadow at noon was the shortest or longest of the
year. Later, markers were added around the base of the monument to
indicate further time subdivisions.

In the quest for more year-round accuracy, Greeks and Romans adopted
from the Egyptians the sundials which were more elaborate in the
construction. One version was the hemispherical dial, a bowl-shaped
depression cut into a block of stone, carrying a central vertical pointer and
scribed with sets of hour lines for different seasons.

Possibly the first portable timepiece - Egyptian shadow clock or sundial -

came into use around 1500 B.C. to measure the passage of "hours."

This device divided a sunlit day into 10 parts plus two "twilight hours" in the
morning and evening. When the long stem with 5 variably spaced marks was
oriented east and west in the morning, an elevated crossbar on the east end
cast a moving shadow over the marks. At noon, the device was turned in the
opposite direction to measure the afternoon "hours." Wealthy people used
portable sundial.
Water clocks were among the earliest timekeepers that did not depend on the
observation of celestial bodies. Greeks, who began using them about 325
B.C., were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a
nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Other clepsydras
were cylindrical or bowl-shaped containers designed to slowly fill with
water coming in at a constant rate. Markings on the inside surfaces measured
the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. These clocks were
mainly used to determine hours at night, besides daytime. Another version
consisted of a metal bowl with a hole in the bottom; when placed in a
container of water the bowl would fill and sink in a certain time. These are
still in use in North Africa.

More elaborate and impressive mechanized water clocks were developed

between 100 B.C. and 500 A.D. by Greek and Roman horologists and
astronomers. Since the rate of flow of water is very difficult to control
accurately, a clock based on that flow could never achieve excellent
accuracy. This naturally led people to other approaches.

During 1510 AD, Peter Henlein, a German locksmith from Nuremberg

invented a spring-powered clock nicknamed "Nuremberg Eggs".

In 1656, Christian Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made the first pendulum

clock, regulated by a mechanism with a "natural" period of oscillation.
Huygens' pendulum clock had an error of less than 10 seconds a day. And in
London in 1671 William Clement began building clocks with the new
"anchor" or "recoil" escapement, a substantial improvement over the verge
because it interferes less with the motion of the pendulum.
The word clock comes from the Latin Clocca through French Cloche
meaning a bell. Bells were very important in the life of mediaeval towns-
people. They rang the hours shown by sundials. They told people when to
get up, when to go to bed, and when to go for prayers.

The world’s first mechanical clock was made in Europe around 700 years
ago. Around 1675, Huygens developed the balance wheel and spring
assembly, still found in some of today's wrist watches.

Over the next century refinements led in 1889 to Siegmund Riefler's clock
with a nearly free pendulum, which attained an accuracy of a hundredth of a
second a day and became the standard in many astronomical observatories.
A true free-pendulum principle was introduced by R. J. Rudd about 1898,
stimulating development of several free-pendulum clocks. One of the most
famous, the W. H. Shortt clock, was demonstrated in 1921. The Shortt clock
almost immediately replaced Riefler's clock as a supreme timekeeper in
many observatories.

To facilitate people to carry the watch with them, wrist watches were
developed. Clocks which started out quite simply had more complicated
additions made later. Clocks which needed winding were later converted to
automatic electric winding.

The Shortt clock was replaced as the standard by quartz crystal clocks in the
1930s and 1940s, improving timekeeping performance far beyond that of
pendulum and balance-wheel escapements. Quartz clock operation is based
on the piezoelectric property of quartz crystals. Such quartz clocks continue
to dominate the market in numbers because their performance is excellent
and they are inexpensive. But the timekeeping performance of quartz clocks
has been substantially surpassed by atomic clocks

Scientists had long realized that atoms (and molecules) have resonances;
each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic
radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are
inherently stable over time.

In the 1840s, a Greenwich standard time for all of England, Scotland, and
Wales was established, replacing several "local time" systems. The Royal
Greenwich Observatory was the focal point for this development because it
had played such a key role in marine navigation based upon accurate
timekeeping. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) subsequently evolved as the
official time reference for the world.

Timekeeping had to reflect changes in the earth's rotation rate; otherwise

navigators would make errors. Thus, improvements were made providing
time linked to "earth" time, and other services, including almanacs,
necessary for sea and air navigation.

With the advent of highly accurate atomic clocks, scientists and

technologists recognized the inadequacy of timekeeping based on the motion
of the earth which fluctuates in rate by a few thousandths of a second a day.
A compromise time scale was eventually devised, and on January 1, 1972,
the new Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) became effective
internationally.

The World's Time Zones

On November 1, 1884, the International Meridian Conference in

Washington, DC, applied zones all around the world. The 24 standard
meridians, every 15° east and west of 0° at Greenwich, England, were
designated the centers of the zones.
The position of the needles in a watch in all advertisements is shown as 10 –
10 – (ten past ten – TPT). Most significant one being the visibility point of
view, which allows the viewer have an uninterrupted view of the face of the
clock. This allows the logo or emblem and the name of the manufacturer to
be fully visible too.