Origin of Gods word

They ended up building an empire based on an area in the mountains, but little is known about their origins. It seems they originated in Northwestern Mexico and were a nomad people (see this PBS article for example) who eventually settled in Tenochtitlan - where modern day Mexico city is - and surrounding areas.Given the cultutal level of the civilisations they were surrounded by and eventually conquered I would suggest the origins of their calender and/or timekeeping long predates when they settled in the middle of Mexico. Maybe they just nicked it from someone they encountered in their ancient history.Who knows where they derived these things from - I'm just saying the mountains bit may be a red herring.

You mean apart from that big yellow ball of fire in the sky ? Edited to change orange to yellowThis message has been edited by MangyTiger, 10-08-2004 10:58 PM

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The most interesting thing about the Egyptian calendar, as it relates to this discussion, is that it had 12 months of equal length, divided into three 'weeks' of 10 days each. That seems pretty clever to me. They always knew how many days there are in month. No need to for grown men to incant nursery rhymes ...

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Really ? I didn't know that. But if the year is 360 days long doesn't that mean the months 'moved' through the year - so you couldn't decide (say) when to plant based on it being the first of the third month or whatever ?A year is how long it takes the Earth to complete one orbit of the Sun (i.e. to return to the same position relative to the Sun it was in when you started measuring the year). This takes near enough 365 days - but if you define a year as 360 days then when your calendar year ends Earth is 5 days away from completing the orbit. After six years you would have slipped a month - after 36 years the month that had been the height of Summer would now be the depth of Winter.Or am I being dense - it is well past bedtime over here.Just thought - did they have a five day holiday at Christmas

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Confused ? You will be...

Good points.I did think while reading some of the earlier parts of this thread that the visual phases of the moon would be very useful to early man. Maybe they were even using "the time when the moon shows a full face again" before they could count up to thirty days. That is just idle speculation of course (before anybody challenges it !).