About Time - Chapter 8 - The calendar

The Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Greeks had made important contributions to measuring time based on the motions of the Sun and Moon. Although impressive feats and serving the purpose of navigating seasonal activities, none of these early methods were very accurate in the long term. Over time the growing complexity of societies increased the need to organize the diversity of social activities in a more accurate and uniform model of time reference. In 47 BC Roman emperor Julius Caesar would answer that need as centuries of observation and measurement culminated in the Julian calendar. Mostly used by the educated, it became an essential tool for planning social activities, work, war and worshipping in an empire that stretched from England to what is now Iraq.

Though a big step 01:18 - forward, this still lacking calendar would hardly be improved during the mostly uneventful Middle Ages. It would only be succeeded by 1582 AD, when Pope Gregory established the Gregorian calendar we still use today. It refined the system of weeks, months and years and was successfully spread through most of Europe. Even though it would take centuries for the public to be able to orientate them within it, the Julian and Gregorian calendars created a uniform linear time frame in which the birth of Christ was established as the reference point of Western calendrical time. Great lengths of past and future events could now be organized in an accessible and orderly calendar, essentially creating the concept of history as we now know it. .