Early Bronze start for 360 day Calendar

[dragonsteeth]

An important part of Velikovsky's work on antiquity involved ancient calendars and their 360 day years which were in use amongst all the main ancient civilisations.
But exactly when was the 360 day year introduced and when was it abandoned? In Egypt it appears to fit the period leading up to the start of the New Kingdom, or before 1700 BCE (assuming Thera erupted around 1628 BCE.)
One of the clearest descriptions of a 360 day calendar with 12 months of 30 days comes from the Assyrian Mul-aPin, which is usually dated to about 2345 BCE. This would place its introduction around the start of the Early Bronze and of the Golden Age of the Minoan Civilization.
References to the length of the solar year in the late Bronze are difficult to trace, but as Velikovsky notes around 700 BCE Numa the King in Rome changed the calendar from 360 days to 365 days.
But this over simplifies matters. The Calendar appears to have gone awry around 1700BCE in the reign of the Pharoah Amenhotep I . The lunar division of the calendar was braking down and for the next thousand years the lunar Calendar became chaotic with months of more than thirty days and with years with at first Eleven and later Ten months as noted by Velikovsky in ' Worlds in Collision'.There is also a reference from the reign of Amenhotep I for a need to re-calibrate the Solstice daylight ratios.

Can we be sure that a 360 day calendar was first introduced at the beginning of the Bronze Age? There are few references to the length of the (solar) year before this time. An isolated mention of a 360 years is inferred in the story of Noah's Flood but it is likely that this was added long after 3000 BCE.
360 day years are mentioned in the early Vedas writings but perhaps these just date from the Early Bronze Age, and while we had so many references to the 360 day calendars in use in Egypt, India and China there appears to be no clear reference anywhere to the preceding use or designation of any sort of calendar designating the length of the solar year before the 360 day calendar sprang up all around the World.

[ericaitch]

Hi there, Whilst I'm no expert on Calendars they have intrigued me since before I gave my talk at Braziers in the 90's.

There I cited evidence from the time of Moses and the Dresden Codex, itself based on older Olmec data, that a year of 365 days existed when these documents were constructed.

Another researcher, Jno Cook, agrees that things did go awry circa 747 BC, the beginning of the era of Nabonassar.

I speculate that about this time, I posit 751 BC, a slight change occurred in our orbit. This added 0.24219 days approx. to our orbit and it was this change that led to the plethora of activity to re-model the yearly cycle with celestial mechanics.

My reason to choose 751 BC is because it is 64 Earth Years, a Venus Cycle, previous to 687 BC, the famous Sennacherib debacle outside Jerusalem.

Sixty-four years later Josiah celebrated a remarkable Passover (of what?).

Dwardu Cardona advises that legend has it that two archangels were involved at both Sodom and Gomorrah and with Sennacherib.

These might not be as scientific as we'd want but the implications for catastrophism are enormous,

ERIC AITCHISON

[ken]

Walt Brown posits that the 360 day x 12 month of 30 days calendar was broken by the catastrophe of the Flood. He shows that this would be caused by the water coming out of the earth, resulting in an increase of angular velocity in order to conserve angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system.

In my view there have been five major civilizations which have each attempted to intercalate the post-flood luni-solar system. These were:
[*]Chaldean / Assyrian / Persian
[*]Egyptian
[*] Hindu / Chinese
[*]Roman
[*]Mayan

In each case they originally attempted to intercalate the lunar month with the tropical year. While the Romans intercalated using leap years, the Babylonians preferred to use leap months instead.

However, in all five cases, the difficulty in keeping the months correlated to the tropical solar year eventually resulted in them giving up and reverting to a civil calendar of 12 artificial months and 365 days, such as the Roman calendar used today. Most of them kept the lunar calendar for religious festivals.

The oldest of these calendars was the Babylonian/Persian civil calendar with 12 months of 30 days. (Supposedly this is still used by banks for the calculation of interest due, though I am slightly skeptical of that claim.)

Every sixth year they added an intercalary month, and a second one, every 120th years. This resulted in the same amount of error as the Julian Calendar, and drifted against the equinoxes by 11 minutes per year.

According to Isaac Cullimore (1835), Tycho Brahe and Scaliger calculated that the reform of Nabonassar in 747 BC, was the result of correcting that calendar after it had been observed for 1486 years, indicating that the root of Chaldean astronomy was from the vernal equinox of 2233 BC.