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From: John Bishop <jbishop@blkbrd.zko.dec.com> Subject: (urth) Re: lunar calendars [Digest urth.v028.n014] Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 16:08:53 Mantis says: > Lunar calendars have thirteen months (13 x 28 = 364). Period. Not that I ever read. The islamic calendar still offically depends on a witness to the new Moon, the Judaic calendar used to (before it could rely on calculation), and the Classic world's lunar calendars did also (in particular, the calendars used to calculate possible eclipse times), though in later times astronomers calculated a sequence of short and long months that would be predictable (by reference) but never more than half a day off the real new Moon. A fixed lunar calendar would pretty quickly cease to be aligned with the moon, which kind of loses the point, and produces the kind of "months" we have, which are unrelated to the Moon. Thus a year would be either 12 or 13 months, depending on whether it had an extra month or not (Judaic "second Adar"), and the months would have either 28 or 29 days. Trusted witnesses would look at the sky, searching for a new Moon to start a new month, and a trusted (priestly) authority would determine when to insert an extra month depending on astronomical observations (such as the Pontifex Maximus in Rome). During the late Classic time, there was a 19-year cycle of long and short months, long and short years which kept the Moon phase predicted by the calendar within half a day of the real Moon phase, and the seasons within half a month of the real season, so direct observation (and the consequent need for messengers to spread the news, etc.) wasn't required. It wasn't perfect (there was a long-term drift), and there was a 57-year cycle which solved most of the drift, but it never became widely accepted. The 19-year calendar was useful because the eclipse cycle is also 19 years (due to the precession of the moon's orbit, which moves the location of the ascending and descending nodes of the moon's orbit along the ecliptic). You could put "eclipse" seasons into the 19-year cycle: they marked the points at which the Earth, Moon and Sun were aligned in such a way that an eclipse was very likely. See Abell's astronomy text and various encyclopedias. I once long ago programed up a calendar maker which used modern data to construct the 19 and 57 year calendars, but I don't know if the Classic ones would have had the same distribution of longs and shorts. -John Bishop *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/