Column Chronicles: Legend of a New Year

Legend of a New Year

Frank Cotolo
January 4, 2024

There are many stories about how the creation of the calendar year and many of them go back to the time it was decided to put numbers on time itself. Although they are all legends, my favorite is the one having to do with the Sumarians in Mesopotamia (not the Sumarians in Sumaria). Some historians say the calendar was created around 3100 B.C. but we cannot be sure since there were no calendars at the time the Sumarians decided to develop a calendar.

The legend spins the story of two brothers working in the newly formed Mesopotamian government. The boys (lets call them Ink and Spot) told the king (let's not call him anything but king) it would be smart for history's sake to keep track of things.

Ink suggested using the sighting of the first full moon to mark each portion of time and Spot said that would be called a day and Ink said to make seven days called a week and four weeks called a month. Only they said it in the Sumarian language.

The king liked the idea and suggested ten months could be called a year but Ink and Spot disliked the idea of ten months being a year because in Sumarian culture the number ten represented famine and plague so the king suggested a year be fifteen months but Ink and Spot said no Sumarian would stand for a year with fifteen months because it would cause violence and upset dormant volcanos so they agreed on twelve months counting as a year.

Then Ink's wife Linear designed the first object to display each month as separated by months. Spot called it a calendar because in the Sumarian language calendar meant 'numbers in boxes'.

Hundreds of years later other civilizations used Linear's design to create calendars to figure how much time passed and they left space on each calendar page for a local business's advertisement.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.