Customer Reviews

Discoveries: The Calendar History, Lore, and Legend (Discoveries (Harry Abrams))

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The history of the calendar is a very interesting topic which can fill thick book, however this one has just 140 pages, and has lots of (really good) illustrations, thus it can only contain a short introduction on this. Especially as I read this book after the much more elaborated books of Duncan Steel or David Ewing Duncan the only new thing in this were the pictures and the appendix containing some historic texts.

Sadly the book also contains some minor errors, especially with the chinese calendar which the author uses as an example for the co-existence of the gregorian calendar with a cultural historic calendar: The last calendar reform in China wasn't in 104BC, but instead in 1645 (not counting the switch to gregorian of course), and the chinese calendar was made in sync with the Meton cycle only before 104BC. And the rule for chinese New Year being the second new moon after winter solstice is only a rule-of-thumb for most cases, not the actual definition of this feast.

Another error is that she says the calendar reform of Julius Caesar did not only bring Rome an orderly calendar, but also converted a lunisolar calendar into a solar one. However the lunar part of Rome's calendar was lost in the centuries before already.

So this book is OK for an introduction for people without much knowledge about this topic, but for anyone who wants to delve deeper into this topic I recommend the books mentioned before instead.