Today a calendar looks very simple. But actually it took many centuries to work out the way of keeping track of time. It was truly hard work, in my opinion. The story of the calendar went back to ancient times, to Babylon, where the wise priests were living. It was they who worked out a calendar which had 29 days in some months and 30 days in others. Their year at first had 12 months in it, but it was several days too short. Soon the months had slipped out of place in the seasons. If every year of ours were several days shorter than the time it takes the earth to go around the sun, Christmas would soon come in the middle of our summer. To keep the months from slipping far out of place in the seasons, the priests put an extra month in the year every two or three years. Very complicated astronomy!

The early Greek and Romans had a calendar much like the Babylonian calendar. Would you like to get more information? Follow my story. It happened that politics began interfering in the problems with the calendar. And during Julius Caesar’s ruling the calendar was badly mixed up. Caesar decided to throw out the moon-month calendar and set up a new one. He asked some astronomers to help in development of the calendar. The borrowed the idea of the year from the Egyptians. The later had worked out the length of their year by watching the bright star Sirius. Their year began when Sirius appeared on the eastern sky at dawn, and it was 365 days long.