Primitive Time-reckoning / A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples

Chapter 25: ADDENDUM TO P. 78 NOTE 2 (P. 80).

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Archaeology & Anthropology History - Ancient

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The study traces how early societies measured time through observation of the sun, moon, stars and seasonal cycles, identifying common solutions such as lunar months, lunisolar corrections and seasonal divisions. Drawing on ethnographic and historical evidence, it compares regional practices, festival-linked calendars and the influence of ritual and religion on dating. It examines astronomical markers used to regulate years, the naming and counting of months, patterns of cultural borrowing and local variation, and it acknowledges evidential limits and methodological challenges while indicating how primitive systems shaped later calendrical forms.

ADDENDUM TO P. 78 NOTE 2 (P. 80).

Prof. Beckman has kindly pointed out to me that according to Are’s Islendingabók, ch. 7 (þá vas þat mælt et næsta sumar áþr i lǫgum, at menn scyllde svá coma til alþinges, es X vicor være af sumre, en þangat til quómo vico fyrr), the Althing in the year 999 A. D. was decreed for the time when ten (instead of nine) weeks of the summer had passed, i. e. it was postponed until a week later in the calendar. The reason for this is undoubtedly that the calendar (the week-year), and with it the Althing, had contrived to antedate itself a little more than a week in relation to the natural year, after Torsten Surt’s reform of the calendar had been introduced about the year 965. Here therefore we have an example of the empirical and occasional correction of the Icelandic calendar which was postulated above.