entry Sept 2015
First,
all calendars are systems of reckoning time over
extended periods. They are all based on the
movement of the moon or the perceived motion of
the sun (or possibly both), and they let
cultures organize political, social and
religious affairs, and life in general. The
common western calendar in use today is the
Gregorian solar calendar, which measures the
passage of the earth around the sun to give us a
year of a bit more than 365 days (with the
addition of a "leap" day added every so often)
divided into 12 months. A lunar year, on the
other hand, is a year of 12 synodic months (that
is, from the appearance of either the dark “new
moon” or else the light of the first crescent (often mistakenly
called the "new moon") to the next new moon
or first crescent), a time of approximately 29
and one-half days, giving us a synodic lunar
year of about 354 and one-third days. Notice the
uses of "a bit more," “approximately” and
“about”. The complexity of calendars stems from
the fact that the natural periods of day, month
and year are not commensurate with one another:
that is, the month is not a simple fraction of
the year and the day is not a simple fraction of
the month or the year. Thus, to keep calendars
from “slipping”, they all have to, at some
point, fudge a little bit and put in “leap” days
or even months. Our western solar calendar has
had two major revisions when it got unbearably
out of sync: the Julian (at time of Julius
Caesar) and the Gregorian (for Pope Gregory XIII
in 1582). Thus we have months with 30 or 31 days
and one month with 28 or 29 (in a leap year),
with increasingly accurate astronomy reminding
us that it will have to put in a leap second
every once in while, but we shouldn't worry
about it. Good. I don't.
The most common lunar calendar in use in the world is the Islamic (or Hijri Qamari) calendar. The Muslim lunar year is 11 days shorter than the western solar year and always has 12 months of either 29 or 30 days. Calendar events such as New Year's or various religious festivals always occur on the same day of the same lunar month and thus “cycle back” through the seasons, making a complete cycle every 33 years. It is used mainly for religious purposes, but in Saudi Arabia it is the official calendar. Other lunar calendars, such as the Jewish calendar and the Chinese one include extra months added occasionally to synchronize it with the solar calendar. These calendars are called 'lunisolar'.
Lunar calendars and other calender-type markings incised or painted on cave walls are extremely old and are a feature of so-called "cave art" extending back even tens of thousands of years into the Upper Paleolithic. So, at a certain point, our species passed from just worrying about today (call it a “sun”) and passed over to trying to figure out how many of these sun-things go into one moon-thing. When we moved from being hunter-gatherers to farmers (almost 10,000 years ago) we had to worry about planting and harvest “seasons” and how many moons go into one “year”.
Thus,
ancient societies such as the Babylonians and
Egyptians, though they still kept track of
months (because they are short and convenient)
used years, as well, and many of them started
reckoning their existence from a certain
beginning, or epoch. That is, the Christian
epoch is the birth of Christ; the Muslim epoch
is the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina,
known as the Hijra, which corresponds to July
16, 622 AD. Some Roman historians used AUC (ab
urbe condita), meaning “from the
foundation of the city” (traditionally, 753 BC),
although it was more common in ancient Rome to
identify years by using the names of the two
consuls who held office that year. That type of
“local” identification causes problems when
dealing with Greek calendars and in the case of
Cuma, calendars of Magna
Grecia. In the period of classical Greece
(the 5th and 4th centuries BC) every Greek
city-state used its own calendar with different
month names, beginnings of the year, and use of
“leap” intercalations (though they all used
lunisolar calendars with years of 12 or 13
months) and the years were named after the
holders of certain offices. (That system still
exists ceremonially in modern Japan. I have an
entrance stamp from Japan in my passport from
the "Year 1" because it was during the first
year of the reign of emperor Akihito.)
It is plausible that the settlers of Magna Grecia brought with them to Italy their calendars from their parent colonies and, thus, the Cuman solar calendar was not related to the one in Paestum, for example. They were no doubt lunisolar; that is, they related the solar year to the two kinds of lunar years —the synodic (from first crescent to first crescent) year of 12 months and the sidereal—measuring the time it takes for the moon to return to the same place in the heavens in relation to a background reference point such as a fixed star (fixed at least for practical human purposes). That takes 27.3 days (approximately!) less than the synodic month, producing a year of 13 months. Thus, you have two ways of measuring the movements of the moon and two kinds of “lunar year”—one of 12 months and one of 13 months, neither of which correspond to the solar year. As I said, we're lucky to have only one moon. (Pity the poor Martians.)
The markings found since 1972 at Cuma show the attempts of the inhabitants to keep track of the months. Here is the information from the display board at Cuma:
Note the
attention given to the relation of one month to
a woman's menstrual cycle, thus to fertility,
thus to the aspect of the female as life-bearing
goddess and to the moon as a female entity. This
interpretation is not novel. Many cave paintings
show realistic or stylized depictions of both
male and female genitalia (Leroi-Gourhan 1968).
It has even been suggested that some ancient
cave makings long thought to be calendar marks
may, in fact, have been actual records of
menstrual periods, put there by female artists
(Fischer 1979). All of that is generally viewed
as at least plausible in the cases of lunar
calendars here and elsewhere in the
Mediterranean, where such designs may be
present. It is, however, not universal; that is,
not all calendar markings are accompanied by
representations of female genitalia. That might
mean nothing, or it might have to do, in a very
broad sense, with the shift in European
mythology from female to male; this is, from the
"earth mother" concept (described here)
to the decidedly male version of the universe we
find in today's large monotheistic religions.
That might have influenced
gender in language (although there is more
speculation than research on this topic). Though
most European Mediterranean languages that mark
nouns by gender have the “moon” as feminine (la
luna in Italian, for example) other
languages may not. In German (and parent
Germanic languages), the moon is der Mond
(masculine). And in English, though "the moon"
is not marked grammatically, such expressions as
"the man in the moon" are telling. Historically,
among Indo-European languages (a very large
family), the gender of the moon can, and does,
vary. But at least in Cuma and ancient Greece,
the moon was a woman —indeed, a goddess. In the
Homeric Hymn to Selene, the Greek goddess of the
moon, we read:
And finally, after the great super blood moon of Sept 2015, I can't help but wonder what the Cumans made of sights such as shown here on the right. Is the moon masculine or feminine? I don't know either.
[See the entry on Cuma and this noteworthy observation by Selene Salvi that specific markings appear to be a Jewish menorah (candelabra) and that this section of Cuma, indeed, appears to be a Jewish catacomb.
photos: the 3 of the walls at Cuma, from Napoli Underground (NUg). (update; April 2022- The NUg website is defunct. jm)
sources:
- Anonymous. 1914. "To Selene" in Homeric Hymns and Homerica. English trans. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, MA., HUP; London, William Heinemann.
- Facts on File Dictionary of Astronomy, 4th ed. (ed. Illingsworth & Clark), New York: Market House Books.
- Fisher, E. 1979. Woman's Creation, New York: McGraw Hill (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Leroi-Gouhan, A. 1968. The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe. London:Thames and Hudson (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Lunde, P. 2014. "Patterns of Moon, Patterns of Sun" in Saudi Aramco World. Nov-Dec. 2014. Houston.
- Marshak, A. 1976. "Some Implications of the Paleolithic Symbolic Evidence for the Origins of Language." Current Anthropology 17: 274-8 (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Ruggiero, F. 2003. "Evidenze archeoastronomiche a Cuma". Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Naples.
- Wenke, J.W. 1984. Patterns of Pre-History-Humankind's First Three Million Years. New York, Oxford: OUP.
add: Sept. 30, 2015
1.
The Lunar Calendars at Cuma
The Good
News is that
We Have Only One Moon
We Have Only One Moon
This is neither a treatise on astronomy nor a history of calendars, but if you don't know what a lunar calendar is, you should probably read the first few paragraphs. On the other hand, if you already know the difference between a synodic month and a sidereal month, you already know more than is good for you!
First,
all calendars are systems of reckoning time over
extended periods. They are all based on the
movement of the moon or the perceived motion of
the sun (or possibly both), and they let
cultures organize political, social and
religious affairs, and life in general. The
common western calendar in use today is the
Gregorian solar calendar, which measures the
passage of the earth around the sun to give us a
year of a bit more than 365 days (with the
addition of a "leap" day added every so often)
divided into 12 months. A lunar year, on the
other hand, is a year of 12 synodic months (that
is, from the appearance of either the dark “new
moon” or else the light of the first crescent (often mistakenly
called the "new moon") to the next new moon
or first crescent), a time of approximately 29
and one-half days, giving us a synodic lunar
year of about 354 and one-third days. Notice the
uses of "a bit more," “approximately” and
“about”. The complexity of calendars stems from
the fact that the natural periods of day, month
and year are not commensurate with one another:
that is, the month is not a simple fraction of
the year and the day is not a simple fraction of
the month or the year. Thus, to keep calendars
from “slipping”, they all have to, at some
point, fudge a little bit and put in “leap” days
or even months. Our western solar calendar has
had two major revisions when it got unbearably
out of sync: the Julian (at time of Julius
Caesar) and the Gregorian (for Pope Gregory XIII
in 1582). Thus we have months with 30 or 31 days
and one month with 28 or 29 (in a leap year),
with increasingly accurate astronomy reminding
us that it will have to put in a leap second
every once in while, but we shouldn't worry
about it. Good. I don't.The most common lunar calendar in use in the world is the Islamic (or Hijri Qamari) calendar. The Muslim lunar year is 11 days shorter than the western solar year and always has 12 months of either 29 or 30 days. Calendar events such as New Year's or various religious festivals always occur on the same day of the same lunar month and thus “cycle back” through the seasons, making a complete cycle every 33 years. It is used mainly for religious purposes, but in Saudi Arabia it is the official calendar. Other lunar calendars, such as the Jewish calendar and the Chinese one include extra months added occasionally to synchronize it with the solar calendar. These calendars are called 'lunisolar'.
Lunar calendars and other calender-type markings incised or painted on cave walls are extremely old and are a feature of so-called "cave art" extending back even tens of thousands of years into the Upper Paleolithic. So, at a certain point, our species passed from just worrying about today (call it a “sun”) and passed over to trying to figure out how many of these sun-things go into one moon-thing. When we moved from being hunter-gatherers to farmers (almost 10,000 years ago) we had to worry about planting and harvest “seasons” and how many moons go into one “year”.
Thus,
ancient societies such as the Babylonians and
Egyptians, though they still kept track of
months (because they are short and convenient)
used years, as well, and many of them started
reckoning their existence from a certain
beginning, or epoch. That is, the Christian
epoch is the birth of Christ; the Muslim epoch
is the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina,
known as the Hijra, which corresponds to July
16, 622 AD. Some Roman historians used AUC (ab
urbe condita), meaning “from the
foundation of the city” (traditionally, 753 BC),
although it was more common in ancient Rome to
identify years by using the names of the two
consuls who held office that year. That type of
“local” identification causes problems when
dealing with Greek calendars and in the case of
Cuma, calendars of Magna
Grecia. In the period of classical Greece
(the 5th and 4th centuries BC) every Greek
city-state used its own calendar with different
month names, beginnings of the year, and use of
“leap” intercalations (though they all used
lunisolar calendars with years of 12 or 13
months) and the years were named after the
holders of certain offices. (That system still
exists ceremonially in modern Japan. I have an
entrance stamp from Japan in my passport from
the "Year 1" because it was during the first
year of the reign of emperor Akihito.)
It is plausible that the settlers of Magna Grecia brought with them to Italy their calendars from their parent colonies and, thus, the Cuman solar calendar was not related to the one in Paestum, for example. They were no doubt lunisolar; that is, they related the solar year to the two kinds of lunar years —the synodic (from first crescent to first crescent) year of 12 months and the sidereal—measuring the time it takes for the moon to return to the same place in the heavens in relation to a background reference point such as a fixed star (fixed at least for practical human purposes). That takes 27.3 days (approximately!) less than the synodic month, producing a year of 13 months. Thus, you have two ways of measuring the movements of the moon and two kinds of “lunar year”—one of 12 months and one of 13 months, neither of which correspond to the solar year. As I said, we're lucky to have only one moon. (Pity the poor Martians.)
The markings found since 1972 at Cuma show the attempts of the inhabitants to keep track of the months. Here is the information from the display board at Cuma:
The outside west wall of the Grotto of the Sibyl displays two groups of vertical marks cut into the stone with a sharp instrument. They were discovered in 1972 by the Unione Astrofili Napoletani - Sezione di Archeoastronomia. Calendar 1 consists of 20 vertical, parallel marks, arrayed horizontally, followed by nine other marks arrayed in a row below that. The top row runs from right to left, the bottom one runs inversely in boustrophedon fashion [ed. note: boustrophedon, literally, in the fashion of an ox plowing the field; that is, back and forth, finishing one row, dropping down and coming back. Ancient Greek writing did this.] A few meters to the right, further down, there is a second group of 13 marks, Calendar B, of which 8 are arrayed in an arc, followed by others, of which 5 are discernible, arrayed in a descending line. On the north wall of lateral arm M of the west wall of the dromos [ed. note: dromos=grotto of the sibyl.], there is a second series of 13 marks, discovered in 1995. They are similar to the other markings and are located at about eye level in respect to the original floor of the walkway. To the right of the markings there is a large spindle-shaped design cut into the rock [pictured, right]. Taken together, these two elements make up Calendar C. These archaeo-astronomical markings may be studied and compared with many other similar ones found in the Mediterranean in prehistoric and ancient times; they are examples of lunar calendars. At Cuma in Calendar A, the 29 marks represent the 29 days of the synodic lunar month [also called a 'lunation']; i.e. the interval of 29.53+ days, on average, between two successive new moons) connected to the corresponding year (29 days x 12 months = 348 days), and to the 13 months of the sidereal lunar year (Calendars B and C) The spindle-shaped design (uterus or vulva), is connected to fertility rites—at Cuma, these were rites to Hera or Isis. This has been documented in a shrine in a seaside villa from the Roman era discovered in 1992. Chronologically these calendars may be dated to between the last third of the 4th century BC and the end of the age of Rome, since they are connected to the cult of Artemis, identified with the Crescent Moon, which from here was visible only in the west, before they started to use the dromos in the High Middle Ages as a quarry, outside of the castrum [settlement] of Cuma.
To Selene
And next, sweet voiced Muses, daughters of Zeus, well-skilled in song, tell of the long-winged Moon. From her immortal head a radiance is shown from heaven and embraces earth; and great is the beauty that ariseth from her shining light. The air, unlit before, glows with the light of her golden crown, and her rays beam clear, whensoever bright Selene having bathed her lovely body in the waters of Ocean, and donned her far-gleaming raiment, and yoked her strong-necked, shining team, drives on her long-maned horses at full speed, at eventime in the mid-month: then her great orbit is full and then her beams shine brightest as she increases. So she is a sure token and a sign to mortal men...
And finally, after the great super blood moon of Sept 2015, I can't help but wonder what the Cumans made of sights such as shown here on the right. Is the moon masculine or feminine? I don't know either.
[See the entry on Cuma and this noteworthy observation by Selene Salvi that specific markings appear to be a Jewish menorah (candelabra) and that this section of Cuma, indeed, appears to be a Jewish catacomb.
photos: the 3 of the walls at Cuma, from Napoli Underground (NUg). (update; April 2022- The NUg website is defunct. jm)
sources:
- Anonymous. 1914. "To Selene" in Homeric Hymns and Homerica. English trans. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, MA., HUP; London, William Heinemann.
- Facts on File Dictionary of Astronomy, 4th ed. (ed. Illingsworth & Clark), New York: Market House Books.
- Fisher, E. 1979. Woman's Creation, New York: McGraw Hill (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Leroi-Gouhan, A. 1968. The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe. London:Thames and Hudson (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Lunde, P. 2014. "Patterns of Moon, Patterns of Sun" in Saudi Aramco World. Nov-Dec. 2014. Houston.
- Marshak, A. 1976. "Some Implications of the Paleolithic Symbolic Evidence for the Origins of Language." Current Anthropology 17: 274-8 (cited in Wenke, 1984).
- Ruggiero, F. 2003. "Evidenze archeoastronomiche a Cuma". Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Naples.
- Wenke, J.W. 1984. Patterns of Pre-History-Humankind's First Three Million Years. New York, Oxford: OUP.
add: Sept. 30, 2015
Other Cave
Markings
It is common to find ordered
rows of markings, notches, and other signs
in caves. They are not all lunar calendars
such as those noted in the general entry
(above). We do well to remember that the coastal caves
in many parts of the gulf of Naples, with
very few exceptions, are man-made. That is
to say that they were cut as quarries to
provide building material for nearby
construction on land. The image
(right) was taken by Selene Salvi of Napoli
Underground within the Grotta del Tuono
[Thunder Grotto] at water's edge of
Trentaremi bay on the Posillipo
coast, near the isle of Nisida (seen
in the image, left, from within the grotto).
Selene tells us that "some scholars
interpret such marks as a kind of
book-keeping to keep track of the work
being done"; that is, perhaps the time
spent in the quarry or the number of blocks
removed, etc. Selene adds that "even the
grotto of the Sibyl
of Cuma appears to be an
ancient quarry that was then reused for
other purposes." That is (possibly),
the large grotto of the Sibyl was first
quarried out by Greek settlers for materials
to build the city of Cuma, itself, or even
perhaps earlier to some extent by the Italic
people, the Opicians, whom the Greeks
displaced (and who, in fact, left some
artifacts on the territory that then became
Cuma); only later was the quarry transformed
into a sacred chamber. (That is, if it ever
was a sacred chamber. In spite of the
weight of opinion from the great
archaeologist, Amedeo
Maiuri, that this really
is the grotto of the sibyl, that
opinion is not unanimous among
archaeologists.)
Such marks are, in a way,
similar in practical function to the "quarry
marks" that we find on many quarried blocks
of stone set in various places throughout
Naples where you can still the work of
ancient stone masons and builders. (Both
images here display such markings; they are
in place at the Agnano
thermal baths.) These signs are most
likely "quarry identifiers," a type of brand
mark to show which quarry actually cut the
stone and/or put it in place. They are
probably not assembly instructions
to show "this end up" or "insert here" or
that sort of thing. (No, IKEA, is a Swedish
acronym, not ancient Greek!)
Thunder Grotto photo, above, left, courtesy of Napoli Underground
It is common to find ordered
rows of markings, notches, and other signs
in caves. They are not all lunar calendars
such as those noted in the general entry
(above). We do well to remember that the coastal caves
in many parts of the gulf of Naples, with
very few exceptions, are man-made. That is
to say that they were cut as quarries to
provide building material for nearby
construction on land. The image
(right) was taken by Selene Salvi of Napoli
Underground within the Grotta del Tuono
[Thunder Grotto] at water's edge of
Trentaremi bay on the Posillipo
coast, near the isle of Nisida (seen
in the image, left, from within the grotto).
Selene tells us that "some scholars
interpret such marks as a kind of
book-keeping to keep track of the work
being done"; that is, perhaps the time
spent in the quarry or the number of blocks
removed, etc. Selene adds that "even the
grotto of the Sibyl
of Cuma appears to be an
ancient quarry that was then reused for
other purposes." That is (possibly),
the large grotto of the Sibyl was first
quarried out by Greek settlers for materials
to build the city of Cuma, itself, or even
perhaps earlier to some extent by the Italic
people, the Opicians, whom the Greeks
displaced (and who, in fact, left some
artifacts on the territory that then became
Cuma); only later was the quarry transformed
into a sacred chamber. (That is, if it ever
was a sacred chamber. In spite of the
weight of opinion from the great
archaeologist, Amedeo
Maiuri, that this really
is the grotto of the sibyl, that
opinion is not unanimous among
archaeologists.)Such marks are, in a way,
similar in practical function to the "quarry
marks" that we find on many quarried blocks
of stone set in various places throughout
Naples where you can still the work of
ancient stone masons and builders. (Both
images here display such markings; they are
in place at the Agnano
thermal baths.) These signs are most
likely "quarry identifiers," a type of brand
mark to show which quarry actually cut the
stone and/or put it in place. They are
probably not assembly instructions
to show "this end up" or "insert here" or
that sort of thing. (No, IKEA, is a Swedish
acronym, not ancient Greek!)Thunder Grotto photo, above, left, courtesy of Napoli Underground
link to Ancient World portal link to archaeology portal to top of this page
© 2002 - 2023