When did man start tracking time through the use of calanders? tracking cycles of orbits.?

Answer 1

The advent of agriculture made tracking time necessary as it was vital for the first farmers to know when to reap and when to sow. So it wasn´t so much that agriculture made it possible for us to get time over to invent stuff. Calendars came about through absolute necessity. Agriculture is 10000 years old so this is when the seasons of the years were first tracked. The Nile floods each year at almost exactly the same time. This was so important to the egyptians that their whole culture was based around this cycle. They built many monuments that could be called calendars, or clocks, as they measured the length of shadows from the sun at different times of the year.

Answer 2

It started much before the Mayan calendar was invented. Old Babylonian star charts (and star globes) of over 6,000 years ago, show some inkling that the precession cycle (25,800 years) was known (not necessarily understood, but at least known to exist).

The Ancien (or Classical) Greeks knew of precession and even gave a somewhat accurate value as far back as 3,000 years ago.

The Mayan calendar shows evidence that they also knew a relatively good value for the precession cycle as far back as 2,000 years ago (could be a lot more, just can't prove it... yet).

Being able to express the precession cycle requires a civilization to already have a calendar of some sort.

The "accuracy" of a calendar was not the important aspect. The more important aspect was whether the calendar was "useful".

The mayans had a base-20 math system. Their calendar uses multiples of 20 for cycle lengths and, on the short term, it is less accurate than ours. However, on the long run (thousands of years) it is closer to the precession cycle (but, how "useful" is that for the population?).

One version of a Babylonian calendar used 360 days as the value of a year. They knew that the "real" year was a bit more than 365 days (and they took the correction into account for their calculations).

But it was far more useful for them, because their math system used a base 60, to have 360 days in the year, 360 degrees in a circle and divisions of 60 for smaller things (it is from them that we inherited, through the Greeks and from Middle Age Europe astronomy, the idea of 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute).

Our calendar (gregorian) comes from a combination of the Roman calendar and the Egyptian one.

The Roman's calendar was "useful" for war planning purposes: The year began in March (Mars, god of war) because the soil was too soggy to send armies anywhere before March. Starting in the 7th month (September) it was time to plan the return, so that the armies would come back (or be encamped somewhere) by the 10th month (December).

In latin : 7 is "septem" and 10 is "decem".

When the 10th month was nearing the end, it was a time of "peace and rejoicing" for the families of the soldiers. Since the Roman armies controlled much of what was known of Earth at the time, it was a time of Peace on Earth.

The start of the year would be flexible, depending on when the weather made it favorable to send the armies (also, later, the governing bodies moved it around depending on their budget decisions).

The Egyptian had a more rigid calendar, with years of 365 and years of 366 to maintain the correct solar cycle of 365 and a quarter.

Julius Caesar is the one who combined both, fixing a date for the start of the year and fixing a length for the year: 365, except one extra day every four years.

As February was the last month of the year, it got the leap day. Poor February got shorter when Augustus Caesar (grandson of Julius) had a month named after himself and insisted that it too should have 31 days -- the needed day was taken from February, leaving it with 28 on non-leap years.

That was the "Julian" calendar (Julius).

However, the tropical year (based on the seasons) is a tiny bit less than 365 and a quarter. Having a leap year every 4 years was a bit too much. Pope Gregory XIII had astronomers look into this and decided to eliminate three leap years every 400 years. Hence, the "Gregorian" calendar.

Answer 3

Thousands of years ago.

But Karl Wolf is wrong about the Mayan calendar being more accurate that our Gregorian calendar. How are you defining accuracy anyway? By keeping the cycle of seasons in sync with the dates on the calendar? The Gregorian calendar does that EXTREMELY well. By comparison, as a calendar for keeping track of the seasons, the Mayan Haab' was crude and inaccurate BECAUSE it doesn't include a leap year.

Answer 4

Karp is correct in his answer except the first true dating showing that the Maya calendar was perfected around the year 400 during the Classic Maya period. Good luck.

Answer 5

Many thousands of years ago!In fact the mayan calander was MUCH more auccurate than our current one, eleminating the need for leap year!

Answer 6

With the last 10,000 years. Agriculture enabled the development of civilizations that could allocate people to the development of calendars and give them a reason.