Contents
- 1 General Queries:
General Queries: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
From The Observatory
General Queries:
2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
General Query: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
General Queries for the Chapter
Below is Hudson’s general research that interested him for possible inclusion in Chapter 2 but that was omitted from the current chapter. Can you help us answer the queries inside the original note below and work anything relevant and significant here into the body of Chapter 2?Suggest an edit or addition to the chapter body related to this query, and/or answer multiple queries from the pop-ups below. Join the research!
Fixed equinoctial hours went hand in hand with variable seasonal hours whose length shortened and lengthened with the time of daytime and nighttime. Days were longer in summer, shorter in winter. Only at the equinoxes were nighttime hours equal in length to daytime hours (divisions into 12). These are what the modern world has, as a byproduct of mechanical clocks, which began appearing in Italy in the early 14th century, starting with Orvieto’s public clock in 1306.Fact CheckHelp us check this fact. (Milan had a clock by 1355,Fact CheckHelp us check this fact. Bologna by 1356, and Siena by 1360.) But public clocks became even more prevalent in northwest Europe, ringing out each hour.
Equinoctial hours are found in the 12th-century BC papyrus Cairo 86637 (in the Cairo Museum), recording the changing lengths of day and night over the course of the year. Lengths are expressed in “parts,” or hours.
Egypt’s 12 hours seem to be a scale model of the months in the year.
The practice spread to Greece after Alexander’s conquests in the 330s and 320s BC. But Herodotus (c. 485–425 BC) mentions “the 12 parts of the day that the Greeks adopted from the Babylonians.”Verify CitationCan someone help us add a source link/citation for us and check the text in the quotation against it to make sure it matches a translation? This would correspond to the zodiac.
Suppose, for symmetry, that the year begins at the top of the zodiac, in midsummer when it is hottest, mirroring the sun’s midday noon; and when it is coldest, at the bottom. This would explain why the spring equinox is “in the middle” on the left side. But then, should it not rise toward midday? Is our zodiac backward? (Or does it reflect precession?)
“It arcs down to the 6th month. At the nadir of the circle is the tritone. Here is where the extra days go. In Egypt, for instance, there are 5 of them, that lie “outside the year.”Missing Quotation MarkA close-quotation mark appears to be missing. Can you help us figure out the original quotation? They fall approximately in August.
After that comes New Year’s Day. This is actually the seventh month, which of course sounds weird, until you reflect that this is in fact what happens in the Jewish year—Rosh Hashanah comes in the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar, and indeed, usually in September as well. (The same thing still happens approximately with the American school year, in fact.)
From here, the year arcs back up to the first month again.
In Britain, the timing must have been different—the octave must have correlated to midsummer, with the first month happening right after midwinter.”Missing Quotation MarkThe open-quotation mark appears to be missing. Can you help us figure out where the quotation begins?
General Query: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
Citation Needed
Some of the concepts mentioned in Chapter 2 are discussed in more detail with citations in later chapters, but in Chapter 2 they are often discussed without attribution. Are there any citations you think should be added to general concepts/facts in Chapter 2? Please include both the citation and the text/context of Chapter 2.Suggest citations for Chapter 2 text as per this query. Join the research!
General Query: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
Illustrations List
This was the list of illustrations intended for inclusion in Chapter 2 that was provided by the author (this list was omitted from the chapter body because none of these images was provided or easily locatable). Can you help us identify them, source them, figure out what their rights situations are (and if they are copyrighted, help us find similar open-source or public domain or creative commons alternatives), and suggest a place to insert them in the chapter body if possible?
Any image suggested for inclusion in The Creation of Order must be licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 or in the public domain if it is to be embedded in the chapter. If it is not CC4.0 or PD, please suggest a link to somewhere externally readers might find the correct image. Please include a source link and attribution information for any image suggestion (Wikimedia Commons links are preferred if available).Suggest an image/images for this query, and/or help us track down an image source. Join the research!
1. The Five Regular Solids, their sides, vertices, and angles.
This may be related to another query (in the section The Dodecahedron and Its Four Related ‘Regular Solids’) about an illustration or chart, possibly from a work by A. Seidenberg—perhaps:
- A. Seidenberg, “The Ritual Origin of Geometry,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 1 (1962a), pp. 488–527.
- or A. Seidenberg, Lectures in Projective Geometry (New York: 1962c). [Observatory Editor’s Note: If this is the case, we will need to add this item to the Chapter 2 Bibliography.]
2. Alex Marshack’s inscribed bone with lunar notations.
3. Alex Marshack’s Magdalenian baton, correlating seasonal phenomena into an Ice Age local zodiac.
4. The “dissonance” between the lunar and solar years.
5. How the rising and setting sun established directions.
6. The horoscope and its zodiac. The clock face is 360 degrees, except that the “12” is now on top, not on the “left” or west where the sun really rises, or at the bottom, where it is at midnight. Thus, the watch face has become “rotated” and decontextualized from its horoscopic beginnings.
6A. Division of the day on the same basis as the year.
7. The Babylonian akitu house outside of the city—like a baby born on a naval cord outside the mother’s body, the New Year is born and celebrated in the akitu house. (Then, back to the city center, for copulation on the ziggurat, in the giginu bowered room.)
8. Symbolic representation of the ziggurat and its levels. Compare with planetary “sevens” and other odd numbers. Cosmological interpretation.
9. Archaic dances with circular movements, apparently emulating the circular movements of the sun, moon, and planets.
