A calendar is a system of organizing days.

This is done by giving names to periods

of time, typically days, weeks, months and years.[1][2][3] A date is the designation of a
single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physical record
(often paper) of such a system. A calendar can also mean a list of planned events,
such as a court calendar, or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as
a calendar of wills.

Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not
necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon.[4][5][6] The most
common type of pre-modern calendar was the lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar
that occasionally adds one intercalary month to remain synchronized with the solar
year over the long term.

Etymology
[edit]

The term calendar is taken from kalendae,[7][8] the term for the first day of the month in
the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare 'to call out', referring to the "calling" of
the new moon when it was first seen.[9] Latin calendarium meant 'account book,
register' (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each
month).[10] The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there
in Middle English as calender by the 13th century (the spelling calendar is early
modern).[10]

History
[edit]

Main article: History of calendars

Further information: Week, Calendar epoch, Month, Lunisolar calendar, Computus,
and Calendar reform

Equinox seen from the astronomic calendar of Pizzo Vento

at Fondachelli Fantina, Sicily

The course of the Sun and the Moon are the most salient regularly recurring natural
events useful for timekeeping, and in pre-modern societies around the
world lunation and the year were most commonly used as time units. Nevertheless,
the Roman calendar contained remnants of a very ancient pre-Etruscan 10-month
solar year.[11]
The first recorded physical calendars, dependent on the development of writing in
the Ancient Near East, are the Bronze Age Egyptian and Sumerian calendars.[12]

During the Vedic period India developed a sophisticated timekeeping methodology

and calendars for Vedic rituals.[13] According to Yukio Ohashi, the Vedanga calendar
in ancient India was based on astronomical studies during the Vedic Period and was
not derived from other cultures.[14]

A large number of calendar systems in the Ancient Near East were based on
the Babylonian calendar dating from the Iron Age,[15] among them the calendar
system of the Persian Empire, which in turn gave rise to the Zoroastrian
calendar and the Hebrew calendar.[16][17]

A great number of Hellenic calendars were developed in Classical Greece, and

during the Hellenistic period they gave rise to the ancient Roman calendar and to
various Hindu calendars.[18]

Calendars in antiquity were lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary

months to align the solar and the lunar years. This was mostly based on observation,
but there may have been early attempts to model the pattern of intercalation
algorithmically, as evidenced in the fragmentary 2nd-century Coligny calendar.

The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.[19] His "Julian"
calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon, but followed
an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. This created a dissociation
of the calendar month from lunation. The Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582,
corrected most of the remaining difference between the Julian calendar and the solar
year.

The Islamic calendar is based on the prohibition of intercalation (nasi')

by Muhammad, in Islamic tradition dated to a sermon given on 9 Dhu al-Hijjah AH 10
(Julian date: 6 March 632). This resulted in an observation-based lunar calendar that
shifts relative to the seasons of the solar year.

There have been several modern proposals for reform of the modern calendar, such
as the World Calendar, the International Fixed Calendar, the Holocene calendar, and
the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar. Such ideas are promoted from time to time,
but have failed to gain traction because of the loss of continuity and the massive
upheaval that implementing them would involve, as well as their effect on cycles of
religious activity.

Systems
[edit]
 A universal calendar, combining different
calendars

A full calendar system has a different calendar date for every day.[20][21] Thus the week
cycle is by itself not a full calendar system;[22] neither is a system to name the days
within a year without a system for identifying the years.

The simplest calendar system just counts time periods from a reference date. [23] This
applies for the Julian day or Unix Time. Virtually the only possible variation is using a
different reference date, in particular, one less distant in the past to make the
numbers smaller. Computations in these systems are just a matter of addition and
subtraction.

Other calendars have one (or multiple) larger units of time.

Calendars that contain one level of cycles:

 week and weekday – this system (without year, the week number keeps on increasing)
is not very common
 year and ordinal date within the year, e.g., the ISO 8601 ordinal date system
Calendars with two levels of cycles:
 year, month, and day – most systems, including the Gregorian calendar (and its very
similar predecessor, the Julian calendar), the Islamic calendar, the Solar Hijri
calendar and the Hebrew calendar
 year, week, and weekday – e.g., the ISO week date
Cycles can be synchronized with periodic phenomena:

Sun and Moon, Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

 Lunar calendars are synchronized to the motion of the Moon (lunar phases); an example
is the Islamic calendar.
 Solar calendars are based on perceived seasonal changes synchronized to the apparent
motion of the Sun; an example is the Persian calendar.
 Lunisolar calendars are based on a combination of both solar and lunar reckonings;
examples include the traditional calendar of China, the Hindu calendar in India and
Nepal, and the Hebrew calendar.
 The week cycle is an example of one that is not synchronized to any external
phenomenon (although it may have been derived from lunar phases, beginning anew
every month).
Very commonly a calendar includes more than one type of cycle or has both cyclic
and non-cyclic elements.

Most calendars incorporate more complex cycles. For example, the vast majority of
them track years, months, weeks and days. The seven-day week is practically
universal, though its use varies. It has run uninterrupted for millennia.[24]

Solar
[edit]

Main article: Solar calendar

Solar calendars assign a date to each solar day.[5] A day may consist of the period
between sunrise and sunset, with a following period of night, or it may be a period
between successive events such as two sunsets.[25][26] The length of the interval
between two such successive events may be allowed to vary slightly during the year,
or it may be averaged into a mean solar day. Other types of calendar may also use a
solar day.

The Egyptians appear to have been the first to develop a solar calendar,[27] using as a
fixed point the annual sunrise reappearance of the Dog Star—Sirius, or Sothis—in
the eastern sky, which coincided with the annual flooding of the Nile River.[28][29]
[30]
They built a calendar with 365 days, divided into 12 months of 30 days each, with
5 extra days at the end of the year. However, they did not include the extra bit of
time in each year, and this caused their calendar to slowly become inaccurate.[31]

Lunar
[edit]

Main article: Lunar calendar

Not all calendars use the solar year as a unit. A lunar calendar is one in which days
are numbered within each lunar phase cycle. Because the length of the lunar
month is not an even fraction of the length of the tropical year, a purely lunar
calendar quickly drifts against the seasons, which do not vary much near the
equator. It does, however, stay constant with respect to other phenomena,
notably tides. An example is the Islamic calendar. Alexander Marshack, in a
controversial reading,[32] believed that marks on a bone baton (c. 25,000 BC)
represented a lunar calendar. Other marked bones may also represent lunar
calendars. Similarly, Michael Rappenglueck believes that marks on a 15,000-year-
old cave painting represent a lunar calendar.[33]

Lunisolar
[edit]

A lunisolar calendar is a lunar calendar that compensates by adding an extra month

as needed to realign the months with the seasons. Prominent examples of lunisolar
calendar are Hindu calendar and Buddhist calendar that are popular in South
Asia and Southeast Asia. Another example is the Hebrew calendar, which uses a 19-
year cycle.

Subdivisions
[edit]

See also: Decade, Century, and Millennium

 Catalan early 20th century perpetual calendar

Nearly all calendar systems group consecutive days into "months" and also into
"years". In a solar calendar a year approximates Earth's tropical year (that is, the
time it takes for a complete cycle of seasons), traditionally used to facilitate the
planning of agricultural activities. In a lunar calendar, the month approximates the
cycle of the moon phase. Consecutive days may be grouped into other periods such
as the week.

Because the number of days in the tropical year is not a whole number, a solar
calendar must have a different number of days in different years. This may be
handled, for example, by adding an extra day in leap years. The same applies to
months in a lunar calendar and also the number of months in a year in a lunisolar
calendar. This is generally known as intercalation. Even if a calendar is solar, but not
lunar, the year cannot be divided entirely into months that never vary in length.

Cultures may define other units of time, such as the week, for the purpose of
scheduling regular activities that do not easily coincide with months or years. Many
cultures use different baselines for their calendars' starting years. Historically,
several countries have based their calendars on regnal years, a calendar based on
the reign of their current sovereign. For example, the year 2006 in Japan is year 18
Heisei, with Heisei being the era name of Emperor Akihito.

Other types
[edit]

Arithmetical and astronomical

[edit]
 Calendar of the Qahal, 5591 (1831)

An astronomical calendar is based on ongoing observation; examples are the

religious Islamic calendar and the old religious Jewish calendar in the time of
the Second Temple. Such a calendar is also referred to as an observation-
based calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is that it is perfectly and
perpetually accurate. The disadvantage is that working out when a particular date
would occur is difficult.

An arithmetic calendar is one that is based on a strict set of rules; an example is the
current Jewish calendar. Such a calendar is also referred to as a rule-
based calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is the ease of calculating when a
particular date occurs. The disadvantage is imperfect accuracy. Furthermore, even if
the calendar is very accurate, its accuracy diminishes slowly over time, owing to
changes in Earth's rotation. This limits the lifetime of an accurate arithmetic calendar
to a few thousand years. After then, the rules would need to be modified from
observations made since the invention of the calendar.

Other variants
[edit]

The early Roman calendar, created during the reign of Romulus, lumped the 61 days
of the winter period together as simply "winter".[34] Over time, this period became
January and February; through further changes over time (including the creation of
the Julian calendar) this calendar became the modern Gregorian calendar,
introduced in the 1570s.[35][36]