A Brill Calendar: July 16

No civilization has ever lacked a calendar of sorts.

Occurrence and recurrence of events presuppose basic endowments of Homo sapiens: observance, recollection and the power to add to a precise site a long-lasting mark. To count, or not to count: that’s the question, especially when it comes to calendars, these children of the marriage of nocturnal and diurnal skies to human thought.

Mechanical ingenuity has little to do with it; painstaking awareness a lot. Stone-age monuments like Avebury in Wiltshire, devised and constructed by a people without the tradition of symbolic documentation, demonstrate that the annual circle of the Eye of Heaven and its monthly ‘alter ego’ of the Moon don’t require literacy in order to be understood. In a cross-cultural comparative study on the innate diversity of Mankind, it is seldom that a better subject presents itself on the ‘longue durée’ of the past as a whole. Assyrian, Babylonian, Chinese, Dorian, Egyptian and Minoan calendars embody this pluriformity. The enumeration may serve as a suggestion of this cultural wealth; not exhausted by the individual examples given.

With the Mediterranean for a hub, European history created an arena where three great monotheist religions of Semite origin created their own and independent calendar: the youngest, serving Muslim civilization, starts counting on July 16 662 in Christian reckoning, following the convention decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, Anno Domini. This tripod of chronological awareness has a complement: vanished & forgotten time-keeping traditions of ‘the people without history’ in the wording of the title of Eric R. Wolf’s seminal book on European cultural dominance.