Important Calendars Of The World
by Aria Solorada
http://www.atcancun.com
Calendars prevalent in different parts of the world use
Earth's revolution around the Sun and Moon's revolution
around the Earth. The Moon takes a month to complete one
circle of the Earth while the time taken by the Earth for
the same around the Sun makes a year. Such calendars are
called lunisolar calendars.
Approximately forty different types of calendar systems are
prevalent in the world. But a majority of them have limited
coverage and only six are considered important due to their
usage around the world.
Most calendars have a start date. The calendar used in the
majority of the Western World, for example, starts with the
Birth of Christ. Of course, no-one at the time would have
dreamed of starting counting time afresh from the birth of a
poor child in a manger in Bethlehem. In fact the idea to
start counting from this date didn't come about until the
sixth century when a scholar called Dionysius began using
it. Thereafter Anno Domini became used for all years
starting with Christ.
It was even later, in the Eighth century when western
scholars began to agree on how to describe the years before
the birth of Christ. BC, standing for Before Christ was
coined by the Venerable Bede, the famous English historian
who died in 735 AD.
The Hebrew calendar, a form of which Jesus Christ and his
contemporaries might have known even if they used the
calendar of the ruling Romans, is similar but not the same
as the Gregorian calendar. It too has a start date however,
and years are counted from the Era of Creation, 'Era Mundi'.
This is about 3760 BC, using an approximate calculation. So
the Hebrew year is roughly the Gregorian year plus 3760.
The Islamic calendar is another religious calendar, but this
one is based on the length of the moon cycle with no
corrections. This means that the months don't always
correspond to the same season, but instead go in 33 year
cycles. The start date for this calendar is the Era of the
Hijra, when the Prophet moved from Mecca to Medina. 1 'AH'
or 'Anno Higerae' is usually considered to be have begun on
the 16th July 622 AD in the Gregorian calendar.
The traditional Chinese calendar is particularly interesting
since it doesn't use a start date. Instead it uses sixty
year cycles which have names rather than numbers. The names
for it's sixty years come from a combination of ten
'celestial stems' and twelve 'earthly branches' which are
combined to make the sixty names needed. The earthly
branches are named after animals - the ox, the dragon, the
rat and so on - and are quite familiar to anyone who has any
interest in Chinese horoscopes.
The Government of China uses the Gregorian calendar for
ease of official business. Otherwise using the Chinese one
due to the sheer complexities of it would create problems.
This is more so now when the world uses the Gregorian
calendar for ease of doing business among them. Since the
world has become more integrated and interdependent, this
use seems practical as well.
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