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Re: Why not 13 months? (Was La Systeme Metrique)
Xuelei Chen (xuelei@cuphy3.phys.columbia.edu)
12 Jul 1995 02:13:20 GMT
In article <3tsqpn$4u4@lace.Colorado.EDU>, hgibbons@hoshi.Colorado.EDU (Hugh Gibbons) writes:
|> Richard P. Muller (rmuller@invitro.invitro.usc.edu) wrote:
|>
|> > I think you also have to recognize the significance of the number 12
|> > to ancient cultures. Many of these cultures had a hard time with
|> > non-integers, so their number systems had bases that could be divided
|> > by many smaller numbers.
|>
|> > I believe that the Sumerian number system was based on 60 (1*2*3*4*5).
|> > This is also a good explaination also for why there are 60 minutes in
|> > an hour. Similarly, the number 12 (1*2*3*4) plays a large role in many
|> > similar cultures. I think that people believed that whatever calendar
|> > system they chose had to fit into cosmic harmony as they saw it, and
|> > so they shoe-horned the calendar into 12 months, even though 13 may
|> > have been more practical.
|>
|> If you assume that the original definition of the month was based on
|> the lunar period (full moon to full moon or new moon to new-moon),
|> twelve would be a closer approximation than 13. (There are
|> 12.37 cycles of the moon per year.)
In Chinese traditional calender, in some years there are 13 months.
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