Look at flags of the world and you'll notice two kinds of flags. Several dozen countries have a crescent moon in their flags. Even if you don't know what those countries are, those are the Islamic countries. Every Islamic country keeps time by the moon and the way that ancient people have done since the dawn of time. That's schism, perhaps is some subtext behind the modern cultural dissonance between the East and the West. We can understand this because in the Islamic countries mostly of the Middle East, timekeeping depended on the moon. The seasonal cycle is not as obvious. For example, in Egypt, the seasons are based on the flooding of the Nile and not on any temperature variations throughout the year. So these cultures of the Middle East, chose to keep a lunar calendar. The word moon comes from the Greek word metron, to measure. In Islamic culture, the festival days, for instance, of Ramadan are only declared when a metazoan of high-standing observes the crescent moon to declare that appropriate lunar cycle. So the crescent moon in an Islamic countries flag, represents the festival day or the time keeping and that's triggered directly by observation of the moon. Now in principle, if the moon was not observed on the appropriate day due to dust or clouds, which are rare and that part of the world, the festival would not be called, the faith would not go to Mecca. But the weather is usually good and the festival is called. But we can see that because the Islamic countries follow a lunar calendar, their calendar shifts by 11 days every year, which means it shifts entirely through our calendar every 33 years. So it is quite hard for us to look at our calendar and predict when Ramadan is or any of the Islamic festivals. So lunar and solar calendars have mixed in human history throughout time, and we can revisit those questions that were asked originally just to see if we manage to answer all of them. One natural question anyone might have is why do we start counting our year on January first? We could start counting our year anytime. The Earth isn't an orbit of the sun and its continuous. We don't exactly know the answer to this question, but it's very likely caused by sun worship and the early Christian cultures in Rome. When you have a new religion and you're trying to co-opt the pagans, you need to adhere to their festivals. The pagans of pre-Christian times followed a pagan calendar, which is based on the solstices and equinoxes. If you're using a monument like Stonehenge to mark calendar time, the movements of the sun rising and setting around the solstice are extremely subtle. So it takes about a week or so before you can clearly see the migration of the sun to higher elevations in the sky. So there's an indication that the calendar we use was tethered to the pagan calendar and started the year that five, seven or 10 days afterwards to make a nod to the pagan culture. Another thing we haven't addressed is the finer divisions of time within the day, the month, and the year. We're talking now of hours, minutes, and seconds. These are also relics going back thousands of years. The division of the day into hours originally just 12 at night and then 12 in a day goes back to Egyptian timekeeping practices. The astronomers of the Egyptian core to the pharaohs, four and 5,000 years ago, used to use timekeeping stars called decans to mark the sky. Typically, although it's not a fixed pattern, about 12 of these stars would be visible tracking across the sky that they would note. So they divided the nighttime sky into 12 sectors and then they followed that practice in the day. So we get ours from the Egyptians. The division of time within that of 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, is even more ancient going back to the Babylonians four or 5,000 years ago. The Babylonians used a base 60 counting system unlike our decimal system. It's not clear why they came up with a base 60 counting system, but it's clearly tethered in astronomy because typically, the sun or the movement of the Earth around the sun subtends an angle of one degree each day, and 60 is a divisor of 360. So there's good evidence that our divisions both of angle and time related through astronomy date back to the Babylonians. Another question you might wonder is why do clocks go clockwise? Now in the modern age with digital timekeeping pieces, there are no hands. However, most people are still partial to traditional watches and they're undergoing a renaissance. So why did the hands move the way they do on clocks and watches? Remember the word clock comes from Middle German for bell. The first clocks built in Europe in medieval times had no phases or hands. People were illiterate and innumerate, there was no reason for that. Basically, it was a bell of tower where the number of rings of the bell would tell people when it was time to go into the fields and come back from the fields at the end of the day. The faces and hands were added afterwards in the 12th and 13th century. In those eras, the clock makers were the highest skilled guild available. They were the primo engineers of the time. Cities around Europe, even a modest size would vie for a clock tower, because it was an enormous status symbol. The oldest clocks such as the Salisbury clock have been keeping continuous time for seven centuries. Those clocks had to go around one way or the other. So why clockwise? That is a simple reference to sun worship. In northern latitudes with the slanting angle of the sun, it appears to move clockwise in the northern sky rising and setting. So the clock face is just a mirroring of the sun's motion. We can imagine if the world's dominant cultures that emerged in the southern hemisphere clocks would go the other way around. We've seen some tension and some relics in our history of the debate between the pagan culture and the Christian culture that followed from it. But the pagan culture still exists in ways that might surprise us. To see this, we only need to look at some of the holidays. The pagan calendar has eight holidays. The fundamental cardinal points of the pagan compass are, of course, the solstices and equinoxes. Those are the festivals that Stonehenge and other monuments commemorate. But pagans also celebrated the midpoints between those four dates. If you think in a calendar, the midpoints are essentially the beginning of February, the beginning of May, the beginning of August, and the beginning of November. All of those are pagan festivals and in various parts of the world they are still celebrated. In Ireland, you will find all four celebrated. February first is called Lughnasa, and it's still celebrated. May Day is, of course, celebrated in large parts of the western world and even in Central America. Then Halloween, All Hallows Day, Day of the Saints, Day of the Dead. This, of course, is our modern reference to that pagan holiday, and it is celebrated in many parts of the world. So we have not completely shaken off paganism even in our modern calendar. The lunar calendar is the primordial human calendar. We have evidence of lunar calendars and counting cycles of the moon going back tens of thousands of years, to the first human artifacts. We also see lunar calendars continuing through time, even though the Western calendar adopted a solar cycle. If you look at the flags in Muslim countries, the crescent moon indicates the fact that those countries in those cultures still follow a lunar calendar.
