Many New Years

The first time that New Year’s Day was celebrated on January 1st was in 45 B.C., when Caesar redid the Roman calendar basing it on the sun instead of the moon.

He added some days to the year in order for it to work and declared every January 1st to be the start of the new year. But he miscalculated the length of the solar year and declared an extra day in February every four years. That was actually too often so that by the Middle Ages the calendar was about 10 days off. In the 1570s that the calendar was finally refined with leap years in the correct places, and since then, January 1st has been celebrated as New Year’s Day.

The ancient Egyptians used a lunar calendar exclusively until they adopted their own solar calendar. The lunar calendar was then used for their religious festivals and rituals, but for their daily lives, the ancient Egyptians used a solar calendar which contained 365 days per year.

Of course, people have celebrated a New Year’s Day before Caesar and not all calendar new years begin in January still today.

Around 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia, the new year was celebrated in mid-March, around the time of the vernal equinox.

Iranians and Balinese still celebrate the new year with the spring equinox.

The Chinese New Year is based around the lunar cycles, and it can fall between late January and late February.

The Celtic New Year began on November 1st, after the harvest.

The Grolier Codex

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 page of the Grolier Codex. (Credit: US-PD/Wikimedia Commons)

Is the Grolier Codex the oldest book discovered in the Americas? That was debated since it was discovered in 1965, but it seems that the book can now legitimately hold that distinction.

Discovered in a Chiapas, Mexico cave, the 11 sheets of bark paper that were part of a Maya book has been studied by a team led by a researcher from Brown University. That analysis seems to put to rest the 40 year debate.

Unfortunately, the discovery was made not by scientists but by looters. It then went through a series of hands of collectors before Mexican customs officials grabbed it in 1977.  It first appeared in a private collection in the 20th century and was displayed at the Grolier Club in New York, hence its name.

A 2007 analysis of the Grolier Codex questioned its authenticity. But, using radiocarbon dating and exhaustively analyzing the Codex’s content, the Brown researchers concluded that the manuscript is real.

The bark pages are in poor condition with mostly the the top section intact and bottoms that are water damaged. (View the pages) They were once bound and there were 9 more pages. The Codex that remains is 11 pages, each with a figure facing left and armed with a weapon. Some hold a chain tied to the neck of a prisoner.

Why so foreboding? It is now thought that the Codex was used to track the movements of Venus in the sky. To the maya, Venus could foretell bad things to come. Marking and numbers on the pages track Venus’ movements. The Maya calendar was based on celestial observations and their calendar calendar contained spans of 104 years, or 13 synodic cycles (the time it takes Venus to come back to the same position in the night sky).