Calendar redux

OF ALL THE THINGS NEOLITHIC PEOPLE gave us (advanced agriculture, polished stone tools, extremely silly earflap hats), few are more confusing than Stonehenge. Even thousands of years after its construction began, the mysterious ruins continue to baffle scientists.

* Stonehenge--a ring of mammoth, multi-ton monoliths--is thought to have been begun in 3100 B.C. by ancient workers digging primarily with sharpened antlers taken from slaughtered animals. Excavating a plot of land this size with little more than a set of Black & Decker gardening antlers clearly wasn't a very efficient procedure: construction took 1,500 years--far longer than the Egyptians needed to build even the largest of their pyramids, and only slightly less time than New York City needed to complete renovations on its East Fifty-first Street subway station.

While archeologists have done a pretty good job of determining when Stonehenge was built, they've been less successful at figuring out why. Originally scholars speculated that the site was a shrine or sacrificial altar. (Archeologist's rule #521: When you're unsure about the purpose of a site you've discovered, always call it a shrine of some sort. I'm just sorry I won't be around in 5,000 years to see a Burger King unearthed and described in archeological journals as the first ancient burial ground with a drive-through window and a zesty all-you-can-eat salad bar.) Ultimately some researchers rejected the Stonehenge-as-shrine theory and decided that, for all the site's enormity, it might have been nothing more dramatic than the world's first calendar. It wasn't the discovery of Garfield cartoons etched into the giant blocks that led to this conclusion, but rather the realization that if you stand inside the ring, the northeast axis of the monolith aligns with the sunrise at the summer solstice, and other stones seem to predict the location of solar and lunar eclipses.

If Stonehenge is indeed a calendar, it can't have been a very good one. Tacking a 50-ton slab of rock to the kitchen wall was difficult at best, and carrying it around in your wallet was out of the question. Not to mention that using the gigantic monoliths to make note of upcoming appointments ("Monday: Plant crops. Tuesday: Polish tools. Wednesday: Buy extremely silly earflap hat") would have been impossible without a good chisel and a lot of time.

If it's any solace to the lingering Neolithics among us, Stonehenge is by no means the world's only imperfect calendar. Ever since human beings grasped the concept of days, we've been trying to keep track of them. Over the millennia there have been Greek calendars and Latin calendars, Egyptian calendars and Roman calendars, Hebew calendars, Byzantine calendars, Texaco calendars, and more. Timekeepers have created 10-month years, 12-month years, and 13-month years. Months have had 31 days, 28 days, and even 29.53 days. And after all that, the only thing virtually every culture in the world can agree on is that 30-days-hath-September-April-June-and-November and that you shouldn't eat oysters in months that don't contain an r.

But things may be about to get a good deal clearer, thanks to Cesare Emiliani, an emeritus marine geologist at the University of Miami. Emiliani has suggested a new, streamlined way of keeping track of the passage of years that he believes will resolve millennia of calendrical confusion. The way Emiliani sees things, the current Western calendar is off by the teensiest bit--about 10,000 years. According to his way of marking time, the present year is not 1994 but 11,994; the earliest Egyptian pyramids were built not in 2700 B.C. but in 7300; Arthur C. Clarke's eagerly awaited 2001 is not seven years in the exciting future but 9,993 years in the distant past.

"By any rational measure," Emiliani says, "human history got its start 10,000 years ago. If you want to chart time accurately and uniformly, you have to redesign the calendar around that reality."

Emiliani, more than most, has made it his business to understand the complicated history of both people and their calendars. The world's very first calendar, with the year divided into months and weeks, was drawn up some 4,000 years ago by the Babylonians; other Middle Eastern peoples duplicated the feat shortly afterward. Each month was 30 days long, corresponding roughly to a complete lunar cycle. Each week was 7 days, corresponding roughly to each waxing or waning phase in that cycle. Though every culture had its own names for the days of the week, the English forms are translations from the Latin or Norse names of the planets and the gods associated with them: Sunday, of course, was named for the sun; Monday for the moon; Tuesday for Tiw, also known as Mars (or for Tuesday Weld, I forget which); Wednesday for Woden (Mercury); Thursday for Thor (Jupiter); Friday for Frigg (Venus); Saturday for Saturn. With the advent of the telescope, many more heavenly bodies would be revealed, but once the days got their names, they generally stuck. This was probably a very good thing, since modern calendar makers would not want to have to explain to the public why they were coming up with names like Plutoday, Pulsarday, or Big Potato-Shaped Asteroid Day.