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| The Calendar
| | David Ewing Duncan
| It is easier to say when the world's calendar finally arrived than when it began. On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong declared that China would follow the Gregorian calendar. For the first time the entire world agreed what the date was.
This is the first complete history of the calendar, and in it are tales of science, religion, superstition and politics of many ages from Ancient Egypt to the flowering of Indian and Islamic civilisations. Julius Caesar attempted to impose a unified calendar on his burgeoning empire, but he could not calculate exactly the length of the year. His Julian calendar gained time over the true solar year,leading to calls for reform during the middle ages, most notably by the British monk, Roger Bacon. These caused all manner of mayhem as between ten and thirteen days were removed at a stroke, pitching religion against science, Catholic against Protestant, taxman against trader, and it was a full five hundred years before Europe was in synch again.
The crucible for the development of astronomy and mathematics, the calendar has always been the measure of how the world is understood and evaluated, and the object of fascination for the greatest scholars. It has existed as long as time itself, but the story of its reckoning is a tale of human will, vanity, experimentation and endeavour - and the diligence of a thirteenth-century British monk: mankind's history of time.
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