Since the dawn of civilisation man has kept track of time by use of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Man noticed that time could be broken up into units of the day (the time taken for the earth to rotate once on its axis), the month (the time taken for the moon to orbit the earth) and the year (the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun).

This information was needed so as to know when to plant crops and when to hold religious ceremonies. The problems were that a month is not made up of an integral number of days, a year is not made of an integral number of months and neither is a year made up of an integral number of days. This caused man to use his ingenuity to overcome these problems and produce a calendar which enabled him to keep track of time.

The ways in which these problems were tackled down the centuries and across the world is the subject of the Calendopaedia site.

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