the Nuer, Bergu, Tobriand Islanders, Maya, Aztec, Inca and Chinese Calendar Systems
from Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures
by Anthony Aveni
Part I – Sensing and Marking Time
Part II – Our Time: the Imposition of Order
[this post concerns itself with the following section]
Part III – Their Time: Following the Order of the Skies
Chapter 5 – Tribal Societies and Lunar – Social Time
p 163
“The tribal societies I describe are relatively small groups of people who depend little on technology but strongly rely upon the seasonal cycles of nature.”
The Nuer – people of the Upper Nile in Sudan
* tall, long-limbed, cattle dependent
* key calendar event = beginning of the rains & flooding
p169
Ecological time – cyclic &
“connects people with the environment though changes in nature to which they react. ‘Ecotime’ is made up of relatively short periods framed within the annual solar cycle.”
Structural Time
“a framework of much larger duration that connects people with one another; it seems to deal more with social rather than ecological concerns.”
for the Nuer, 2 extreme seasons: rain (Mar to Sep) & drought (Oct to Feb)
tot = wet season
mai = dry season
rwil = Apr to May – time to move from camp to village
jium = Oct to Nov – time to move from village to camp
p170
“none of this time is marked out by equinox or solstice with the extreme precision of our own western calendar. Instead, time… becomes the relation between activities on several different planes of existence.”
Lunar cycles
* each full moon has its own name
kur = Nov – Dec moon
dwat = May – Jun moon
p171
“Month names represent the activities that go with that month.”
“Activity supersedes time in the sense that we know it.”
“… a series of conceptualizations of natural changes the selection of points of reference being determined by the significance that these changes have for human activities.”
the Nuer count their days in terms of “sleeps.”
The Mursi – people of SW Ethiopia
* semi-nomadic
* wet-dry cycle between two rivers.
* key calendar event – first moon after bergu 12
p172
“For the Mursi, a calendar is… a live interactive process filled with social dialogue and… much heated argumentation.”
bergu = 12 lunations (~354 days) in a seasonal cycle
“As in all environmentally-based calendars, transitions are critical, and the most crucial part of the cycle occurs at the onset of the major rainfall period that causes the flood. Generally, the rain falls when the bergu is 8 lunations old, which… does not mean the same as ‘in the eighth lunation.’ The activity is thought to occur at a stage in the annual cycle rather than in a specific lunation. The Mursi seem to be concerned more with lapsed time or duration than with time as a marking of events in a sequence.
“At the end of the twelfth lunation, the cycle of ativities is completed and they say that the time is jamwe“
* first phase of bergu 5 = solstice
* during bergu 6 = Pleiades overhead at sunset
* second phase of bergu 9 = Pleiades heliacal setting
p174
“The Mursi had to learn to agree to disagree about how to keep time.”
Tobriand Islanders – Northern New Guinea
* 10 months, names correlated to agricultural activity
* marked by astronomical and biological time checks
* key calendar event: palolo worm’s emergence to the surface of the Pacific reefs
* once a year for 3 or 4 nights, the worms wriggle to the surface to spawn
* occurs following the Full Moon between 15 Oct and 15 Nov
Milamala = month in which the Palolo worms spawn
The month of Milamala occurs
1 month later in the Southern Islands
2 months later in the main part of the island to the North
3 months later in the Southern extremities
Milamala
* a set of 4 months broken down regionally by island groups
* month is determined retroactively based on vermicular observation
p 176
“… the whole territory completes a twelve- or a thirteen-month lunar cycle, and yet no given area actually counts more than ten months.”
p178
“Structural time does not really move. … people pass through its everpresent, invisible framework in endless succession. Age-sets are fixed, stratified, and segmented age groups through which every male member of Nuer strictly moves…”
p178-9
“… and seem to move in a progressive rather than cyclic way, from one stage of life to the next… after which they die and their set becomes a memory.”
Nuer history
* stages between tribes founder & current clan
* stages = generation steps
Mursi
* age difference matters more than chronological age
Ch 6 – The Interlocking Calendars of the Maya
Chilam Balam – the Mayan codex of calendrical prognostications
Popul Vuh – the Mayan creation story
p191
“What sets the maya part is… their preoccupation with ‘commesurateness’ – perfecting the way time cycles interlock and fit together.”
“The Maya got some of their ideas about time from the Olmec… also from the Zapotecs.”
“… these people used the parts of their bodies to count the days.”
p193
“… time is the sun’s cycle itself.”
p194
“East, the rising place of the sun, is thought of as the principal cardinal point – where all things enter the world.”
p195
“… the root of their principal cycle, the number 20, is ordained… in the human body.”
“… the day revealed the god [glyphs/archetype]: it showed his attributes plainly and visibly to both eye and mind. As with sun – day – time, the Maya conceived of the day as a manifestation of the god itself.”
p197
“There is nothing like the 260-day divinatory cycle anywhere else in the world.”
p199
“The thirteen gods of heaven were said to have dueled with the nine lords of the underworld for possession of our earthly region.”
p200
“… the birthing cycle is a fair approximation to the length of the basic agricultural cycle in most areas of [Maya lands]…”
p201
“… all calculations were made from the [onset of the] rain…”
* average interval between Venus appearing as the Morning star and as the evening star – about 263 Days
* 173 1/2 days between successive eclipse seasons
* 2 x 260 = 3 x 173 1/2
“… certain named days n the 260-day count seem to have been designated as inauspicious because they were the ones on which it was possible for eclipses to occur.”
“… certain days that are particularly vulnerable to the occurrence of eclipses can be found in clusters at intervals set one third of a cycle (about 120 days) apart…”
* gravitation constant for the speed of light related to 260 numerologically?
* Maya did not observe a leap year
* The days realigned themselves ever 1460 Years
* 52 Years = 73 x 260 = 18 980 Days
p218
“… they produced a recyclable table for predicting eclipses that was 11 960 days long and a reusable Venus ephemeris of 37 960 days.”
* the Dresden Codex – measures cycles of time
Ch 7 – Aztecs and the Sun
Aztecs – Mexica people who spoke Nahuatl
* Tula (Tollan) & Teotihuacan – key pyramids
* Tenochtitlan est. c. 1325 CE on lake Texcoco
* 1519 Cortes lands at Veracruz
p254
“the Aztecs kept a 260-day calendar, which they called tonalpohualli; and a 365-day year (xiuhpohualli), which they, too, combined with a 52-year calendar round.”
“Closure of the 52-year round was vital.”
“They timed the end of the 52-year cycle precisely by the occurrence of a celestial event. The passage of the Pleiades overhead provided the signal for renewal.”
p260
“The idea of a rotating cycle of celebrations, each one taking place in a different set of temples, suggests that, for the Aztecs, time and place were naturally juxtaposed.”
p264
“Xiuhtecuhtli, the celestial fire god, is located at the center of the cosmic diagram… He is the first of the Nine Lords of Night”
* Lords of Night:
1st Xiuhtecuhtli – Centre – fire/sun
2nd Iztli – East/right – flint/knife
3rd Pilcintecuhtli – East/left – young maize
4th Cinteotl – South/right – maize
5th Mictlantecuhtli – South/left – death
6th Chalchiutlicue – West/right – jade skirt, female, water
7th Tlzizolteotl – West/left – earth, cleanser of soul
8th Tepeyollotl – North/right – heart of the hill
9th Tlaloc – North/left – rain
p265
“If there is a central theme about order in the universe depicted on this codes page, it is the idea that all things are arranged in categories of four.”
p268
“The Aztec Sun Stone is… a symbol commemorating the events of all creations and including every one of time’s divisions as well.”
p270
“Creation time repeats itself, but it is punctuated by periods of destruction… the present contains pieces of the past.”
Ch 8 – The Incas and Their Orientation Calendar
p278
“[The Imperial Incan] timepiece was the city itself.”
* Synchronizing time across a long North – South kingdom proved a challenge
p279
“… the Inca had built, into the natural landscape surrounding their capital city, an orientation calendar. It consisted of specific sight lines directed to the sun moving at the horizon, and even a scheme for counting the days.”
* Tahuantinsuya (four quarters) – the Inca Capital city
* Coricancha – Temple of the Sun
p279
“… 41 invisible radial lines, called ceques; that crossed the landscape, each emanating from the Coricancha. These lines were marked out by huacas, or sacred places.”
p283
“The whole ceque system looks strikingly like a quipu, an array of knotted strings bound together on a common cord… its very structure invokes radial and hierarchical ways of representing space and time used on a grand scale.”
p285
“The ceque system of Cuzco, then, was born out of an ideology of responsible human action.”
p289
“… certain huacas were larger stone monuments positioned at key sun positions along the horizon, like the minute markers on a clock dial [incl. the Sun Pillars]“
“… the Inca had converted the landscape into a natural, self-operating calendrical device powered by the movement of the sun, a system with no need of formal writing to articulate it – only the celebrated Inca sun pillars.”
p293
“… the Inca tried to establish a concrete physical relation between Coricancha at the center of their city and natural events that took place at the mountain periphery of Cuzco. This relationship helped structure an urban plan that would assure perfect harmony between their works and those manifest in nature, and most notably the course of the sun god.”
p294
“In the tropics [from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer], a pair of dates, which depend upon latitude, will mark the sun’s zenithal crossing. These dates divide the year into two parts; the first when the sun passes north, and the second when it passes south of the overhead point at noon.”
p295
“… the people of ancient Java (7 degrees S latitude) developed a shadow-casting device to partition the year…”
* the device is a basic sundial
p297
“The Inca lived in a vertical world, a space in which time for human action… depended critically upon where a person was positioned in a vertically-based ecology…”
p299
“ceques and huacas are parts of an orientation calendar that graphically follows the solar cycle, they also function as a calendar in the way we are acquainted with the term – as a mnemonic scheme for counting the days.”
* huacas = 328
* 328 + 37 = 365
* 37 days from May 3 to Jun 9, setting to rising of Pleiades
* ceques = 41
* 8 x 41 = 328
* moon’s sidereal period = 27 1/3 days
* 3 x 27 1/3 = 82 = 2 x 41
p302
“A general rule, in the form of a timing mechanism with built-in crosschecks, is: the first full moon after the heliacal rise of the Pleiades always defines that month which includes the June solstice.”
p302-3
“[the Inca] sought to cover all activity in the universe under a single umbrella made up of the dimensions of space and time. The ceque system was neither image nor representation: it was Tahuantinsuya itself.”
Ch 9 – Eastern Standard Time: Reckoning in China
p308
“Chinese cyclic time is embedded in certain natural resonances that operate on the principle of complementary dualism.”
p311
“The Chinese think about the past in terms of three ages: the mythological, the ancient and the modern.”
p317
“The basic time unit… is based on multiples of the number 6…”
* 60 year cycles function of 10 heavenly stems and 12 earthly branches
* 28 lunar houses
* 60 years marks a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the same house/constellation
p318
“The ancient Chinese watched Jupiter as avidly as the Maya tracked Venus.”
p319
“To monitor changes in the agricultural year, they split the year into 24… periods of 15 days… These divisions were said to constitute the Joints and Breaths of the year cycle.”
p320
“… the 135-month period, the so-called Triple Concordance, brought together the Jupiter period, the seasonal year, and the lunar-eclipse cycle.”
Ch 10 – A World of Time
p330
“Modern astrophysics places the beginning of time approximately fifteen billion years in the past – but a few days in the life of Buddha and only a thousand times the length of the longest time units in the Maya Dresden Codex.”
