Tomorrow is the June solstice, one of the points that divide the natural year into four quarters.
That’s one of the illustrations from my page called “Seasons: the equinoxes and solstices,” where I’ve said all, or almost all, I’m capable of saying about all four of ’em.
But here is a bit more.
A friend who is an archaeologist has discovered a hitherto unknown civilization. That is, she was led to a site in an almost inaccessible valley in the Hindu Kush, where there was a mound, which she has excavated, revealing a queendom that flourished there four thousand years ago. Its inscriptions, on slates, were in a script hitherto unknown, and she sent rubbings of them to me in the hope that I could decipher them. I have managed to do so, and to reconstruct the language, also hitherto unknown. The deciphered literature reveals cultural features also hitherto unknown, and one of these is the calendar. There at first appeared to be no calendar; no words corresponding to “month” or “week” could be identified, though there were names for years, such as “The year when Rinkon’s house fell down.” But there was something referred to by a word that seems to mean “longshadow.”
At length I and my friend, in our email correspondence to and fro, realized that this was the calendar. The Kond had learned that there is a day in the middle of which shadows reach their longest. They must have set up a ritual pole, and marked on the ground the end of its shadow. They then counted days from that one. For instance they would name tomorrow as “longshadow 182.” Or “183,” if the count was inclusive.
What do you think of that? A decimal calendar, and one proof against drift, unlike the Julian and so many other calendars.
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I have a hard enough time reading Mr. Hubbard’s posts, so I am quite certain that I would not be able to decipher and reconstruct a hitherto unknown language written in a hitherto unknown script, so my hat’s off to you sir! I should add that I always find Mr. Hubbard’s comments very interesting, so I always read them, despite their hitherto unknown system of punctuation LOL.
hope to see a documentary on this.
It’s fiction, of course, part of my idea for a novel. So you’ll see the documentation if and when I manage to write that.
It’s the winter solstice here today (21 June) at 1.32pm. The science teacher at the local boys’ school, whom I know quite well, told me that he and the boys had been doing an experiment since the start of the school year in January, measuring the shadow of a post on the side of the playing fields. He’s taking his class out onto the fields today to demonstrate that the shadow will be at its longest. I’ve forwarded your post to him so that he can tell the boys how old this practice is.
Of course, this will all be dependent on the weather. It’s been chilly, cloudy and wet here for days.
I would want to live in a culture that uses two calendars, one solar and one lunar. The solar calendar would be marked by holidays for the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days, the lunar calendar by holidays for the new and full Moon. We would have a lot of holidays, and the different rhythms of the two calendars would make each year different from the last. We would assign special significance to years when the new Moon coincides with winter solstice, or the full Moon with summer solstice. Our scholars would teach us that it takes about 19 years for the lunar and solar calendars to return to the same relationship with one another, so turning 19, 38, 57, 76, and 95 years old would be milestone birthdays.
I guess I’ll have to befriend an archaeologist and convince them to discover this culture for me.
P.S. Happy solstice to one and all.
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a lovely summer solstice sunrise over Stonehenge. Following one of the links in the caption eventually led me to a wikipedia page which says that archaeological evidence suggests the ancient Druids held feasts there on the winter solstice, and not on the summer solstice (the bones and teeth of sacrificial pigs show that they were all slaughtered in winter). If I were a modern British neopagan, I wouldn’t let historical veracity interfere overmuch with a good party. The weather is so much better in June!
I made this speculation when we watched the 2002 summer solstice sunrise from Stonehenge, and said, in the cover picture story about it for Astronomical Calendar 2003:
“It occurs to me that the Stonehenge axis could be the reverse: southwest, toward the midwinter sunset. The Avenue does not continue as a straight line but takes two bends, descending southeastward to the Avon; it seems likely that it was a processional approach; then the view was from the center OUT through the Grand Trilithon, which is like the chancel of a church. After all, the point of sunset is much easier to watch for, and there is motive to watch for and mark its southern standstill: early people had no assurance that winter would give way to a new year until they saw the sun cease its southward retreat. Not surprisingly, with more reading I found I was not the first to contribute this idea.”
That makes a lot of sense. I’m impressed that archaeologists can figure out what time of year a pig was slaughtered thousands of years ago. That’s kind of like deciphering an ancient text.
The solstice is an ungodly 0430ish here so I doubt that I’ll be photographing Sol coming up over the sea and also an anti climax as after tomorrow the Sun starts it’s, seemingly eternal although it’s not as eternity will see many Suns and Earths(many us’s perhaps too?),trip back from the Tropic of Cancer back to the Tropic of Capricorn via the Equator.I’ve made up by not seeing the solstice by seeing noculucient clouds instead.