Calendar in ancient culture

Calendars are manmade tools used to track time. They have become almost indispensible tools of human civilization.

Ancient cultures develop calendars to keep track of longer stretches of time that coincide with the four seasons.

Calendars are based upon astronomical observations, marking the passage of time using the phases of the moon and movement of the Sun. Civilizations from Asia to the Americas develop calendars based upon the phases of the moon.

Early calendars were usually for agriculture, financial, religious and political uses and often did not include a year count. The first historians to use calendar date systems for relating events were the Greek historians.

Ancient Greek calendars go back to early Antiquity but evidence of how they were structures and reckoned begins only in the sixth century BC. In general the calendars of Greece were lunar, but their lunar character could be disrupt by deliberate interference or tempering.

The main Athenian calendar is often called ‘archontic’ or ‘festival calendar’ - although its use went far beyond the determination of festival dates – to distinguish it from the so-called ‘prytanic calendar’, peculiar to Athens, that was used at Athens alongside it.

It wasn’t until Rome was fully under the rule of Augustus Caesar that calendars were used to refer to particular year names or numbers and month and day dates.
Calendar in ancient culture

History of map-making

Antique maps are categorized as imaginative illustrations of their subjects: creative nonfiction and it might apply to the art of map-making.

For this reason, these pioneers of map-making felt it necessary to separate their ideas of ‘true’ map-making from maps that relied on exaggeration or imagination.

The idea of map-making was known in Egypt, where plans of particularly districts or objects as mines, houses and temples were being drawn up a early as 1400 BC.

Anaximander (611-547 BC) was the first among the Greeks to represent the details of the surface of the earth by maps. His map showed the world as a flat disc with named parts for the Mediterranean, Italy and Sicily.

The earliest periods in mapping in both the Western world and China involved understanding the earth’s shape and size. Contrary to popular belief, the essentially spherical shape of the earth and been recognized by the Greeks as early as the fourth century BC.

Claudius Ptolemy (98-168 AD), a Greek who lived and worked during the peak of the Roman Empire, is the foremost figure of map-making history.

His major contribution to map-making was a book known as Geographia, which included instructions for making map projections, for making world and sectional maps and for using latitude and longitude which also listed coordinates for about 8,000 places.
History of map-making

Ancient Roman technology

By the first century AD Rome had become the biggest and most advanced city in the world.

One of the things about ancient Roman civilization that most impresses people today is the Roman’s use of technology.

The ancient Romans came up with new technologies to improve the city’s sanitation systems, roads and buildings.

They developed a system of aqueducts that piped freshwater into the city, and they built sewers that removed the city’s waste.

The farmers grew olives, grapes, wheat and other fruits and vegetables. They used tools seeds and techniques created earlier throughout the Mediterranean world. These included irrigation systems and ox-drawn plows.

Ancient Rome’s have a vast network of roads that reached throughout the empire. More than 50,000 miles of roads extended from Rome to the farthest provinces.

Army engineers often designed and constructed roads as a means to swiftly move army legions from place to place and to keep them supplied.

The Romans developed new techniques and used materials such as volcanic soil from Pozzuoli, a village near Naples, to make their cement harder and stronger.

Some of the most important construction methods that the Romans used in their building projects were arches, vaults and domes. Arches support weight better than flat-topped openings.

A doctor in ancient Rome had little or no training. Most of them simply learned their skills as apprentices to other doctors.

Roman doctors tackled some surprisingly delicate operations, such as removing small tumors and repairing a hernia. They even removed cataracts from the eyes.

Their medical tools were often made from bronze, as this was a practical and relatively cheap way to produce surgical instruments, though the best doctors preferred instruments made from fine quality.
Ancient Roman technology