Just Who Decided to Celebrate the Birth of the Year in the Barrenness of Winter?
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For thousands of years human beings have recognized an essential peculiarity about time: In some ways it behaves linearly, with event following event into infinity; and in some ways it behaves cyclically, with event repeating event in one great cosmic variation on a theme.
The principal ways in which we reckon time—by days and years—take both into account. Although days follow one another in endless progression, to the last syllable of recorded time, we group them into arbitrary cycles of seven called weeks, which repeat over and over again. And though years march inexorably on,a century after century, they also have a seasonality, with one summer or winter very much resembling another; the year, that is, has a kind of wholeness, a beginning, middle and end—but especially a beginning, which has been celebrated by almost all peoples almost always.b
When did human beings begin to consider the first of the year an important date? And how did we get saddled with January 1 as our New Year’s Day—a completely arbitrary date?
In fact, as far back into history as we can look, the new year matters. Texts from the third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamian cities of Ur and Adab tell of the akitu festival, held twice a year to celebrate the seasons of sowing and harvesting. Inscriptions from the reign of Gudea, who ruled the Mesopotamian city of Lagash around 2100 B.C., describe akitu festivals as new-year celebrations honoring the sacred marriage between the city-god and his wife.
In the Old Babylonian kingdom (1894–1595 B.C.), the akitu new-year festival was celebrated only once a year, at the time of the spring equinox (the season of sowing). The chief function of the akitu festival seems to have been to restore harmony to the cosmos. The new year, that is, marked a new beginning, a new cycle of growth, and the akitu celebration helped to ensure that the future would bring health and prosperity.
This meant celebrating a ruler’s semi-divine status as mediator between heaven and earth or restoring the city-god (in Babylon, the god Marduk) to his temple and appeasing his wrath. The ancient Psalm to Marduk, for example, was a plea to the god chanted during the akitu festival. Several copies of the psalm have been found on tablets in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–633 B.C.) at Nineveh (Marduk was also an 007important god for the Assyrians), though these copies are believed to be later translations of an earlier version written in Sumerian. “O Lord,” runs the psalm, “let thine own divine spirit bring thee rest. O thou who art the hero of the gods—may the gods of heaven and earth cause thine anger to be appeased … Look favorably upon Babylon.”
Curiously, one of our most important ancient texts, the Bible, nowhere mentions a new year’s celebration. Leviticus 24:24 states, “In the seventh month [Tishri], on the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of complete rest, a holy convocation commemorated with trumpet blasts” (see also Numbers 29:1–6). In post-biblical Judaism, this dates marks the celebration of Rosh Ha-Shanah (meaning “Head of the Year”), traditionally the Jewish New Year’s Day, which is still celebrated with blasts of a horn (shofar). However, the Jewish calendrical year begins on the first day of the first month (Nisan), so many scholars believe that the biblical date of the first of Tishri is a survival from an even older agricultural calendar, celebrating the harvest. The ancient Israelites, like their cousins the Mesopotamians, appear to have celebrated the new year at least twice, once at the spring equinox (sowing) and again at the fall equinox (reaping).
Clearly, the year should begin in spring, as it has during most of mankind’s existence. How on earth did we ever get a date like January 1 to launch a new year, a fertile new cycle of growth and rebirth? It’s the fault of the Romans.
In 153 B.C., while reforming a calendar that had gotten out of whack with the solar year, the Roman senate declared that the year would thereafter begin on the first of January.c This date had no natural justification; traditionally the Romans, like everyone else, had celebrated the new year in the spring—a practice evident in the names of the months of September (Seventh Month) through December (Tenth Month). January 1 was simply the day after the Roman elections, when the new consuls took their posts. The senate, in its wisdom, thought it simpler and more efficient for the civil/political year to match the calendrical year—and now, more than two millennia later, we are stuck with it.
By the first century B.C., the Roman calendar had again become hopelessly disconnected from the natural (or solar) year. Working with the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.) proposed a new calendar based upon a calendar developed by the earlier astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 B.C.). The Julian calendar established a 12-month year having 365.25 days, with the extra quarter day made up every four years as a leap year (the actual solar year is 365.242199 days)—basically the calendar we use today. As part of his reforms, Caesar recommended that the new year begin on the spring equinox (March 21) or winter solstice (December 22), to give New Year’s Day a natural reason for being. But he was ultimately unable to convince the senate.
The final episode of our story began in the 1570s, when a group of church astronomers recalculated the length of the solar year at a remarkably accurate 365.2422 days. Over some 1,500 years, then, the Julian calendar had fallen ten days behind the solar calendar. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull adopting these calendrical reforms. To re-adjust the year to the natural solar year, he declared that October 4, 1582, would be followed by October 15, 1582. Moreover, he officially declared that the new year begins, as the Romans decreed, on the first of January.
The Gregorian reforms were slow to catch on. England, loath to follow the dictates of a Catholic Pope, clung stubbornly to the Julian calendar until 1752. By the early 20th century, however, virtually everyone in the world was reckoning time the Gregorian way—and celebrating the “Head of the Year” on January first.—J.M.
For thousands of years human beings have recognized an essential peculiarity about time: In some ways it behaves linearly, with event following event into infinity; and in some ways it behaves cyclically, with event repeating event in one great cosmic variation on a theme. The principal ways in which we reckon time—by days and years—take both into account. Although days follow one another in endless progression, to the last syllable of recorded time, we group them into arbitrary cycles of seven called weeks, which repeat over and over again. And though years march inexorably on,a century after century, they […]
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Also, years have often been organized into eras, with each era providing a new “cycle.” Our own era—the Christian (or Common) Era—was the creation of a sixth-century A.D. Syrian monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who borrowed the idea from the Seleucids, the Hellenistic rulers of much of the Near East following the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. (see the following Origins columns in Archaeology Odyssey: William H. Hallo, “In One Era and Out the Other,” Premiere Issue 1998; and Leonora Neville, “Fixing the Millennium,” January/February 2000).
2.
Although the year is common to cultures around the world, ancient and modern, it is sometimes defined differently. For example, the lunar year is defined by the cycles of the moon, rather than by the earth’s orbit around the sun. Some lunar calendars make use of intercalation (the adding of days or months) to reorient the lunar year to the solar year. But the Islamic lunar calendar does not, meaning that every successive new year begins on a different day of the solar year.
3.
The name “January” was chosen to honor Janus, a two-headed god who looked both toward the past and toward the future.
