#1184 Why does the year start on January 1st?

Why does the year start on January 1st? The year starts on January 1^st because of the Romans and then Pope Gregory XIII. Although, for most of the history of civilization, the year did not start on January 1^st,, and for a lot of cultures, it still doesn’t. In fact, for the 1.4 Chinese people and 1.9 billion Muslims in the world, the new year doesn’t start on January 1^st.

In the very early days of humans living together in groups, there was no technical concept of a year and there were no calendars. That being said, everybody knew that the seasons changed, so there might have been an idea that one cycle of seasons had passed, and another one was starting. As to which season they saw as the last one and the first one, I have no idea. Once groups became a little more sophisticated, they started counting the years by how many times the moon comes and goes, giving birth to the lunar calendar.

Calendars evolved through the Bronze Age and the first idea of celebrating a new year started in Mesopotamia in about 2000 BC. The festival was held in the spring and celebrated the birth of the new year. And spring does make sense because that is when life starts after the long cold winter. In 1500 BC, China started celebrating their new year on the second new moon following the winter solstice. That is usually in later January or early February, and they still celebrate it at the same time today. The Egyptians celebrated the new year in the summer, in the middle of July, when the star Sirius appeared in the sky. Sirius is a very bright sky and can be seen on the horizon in the summer. In the Islamic calendar, the new year was taken to be the first crescent moon in the holy month of Muharram, and was the day that the Prophet Muhammad led his followers from Mecca to Medina. This falls in the months of June or July and Muslims still celebrate the new year here.

So, why do we in the West celebrate it on January 1^st. It started with the Romans. In the beginning of Rome, the new year was celebrated on March 1st. This is why September, October, November, and December mean 7^th month, 8^th month, 9^th month, and 10^th month, even though they are the 9^th to 12^th months for us. If the year starts in March, then September is the 7^th month and that makes sense. However, they only had 10 months, which left them with a big chunk of days spare over the winter. In the 7^th century BC, Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, divided the year into 12 months and invented January and February. They were in the place they are now, the winter, but they were at the end of the year because it started in March. Then, possibly in the 4^th or 5^th centuries BC, January and February were moved from being at the end of the year to being at the start. Nobody knows why, but it could have happened when the foundational laws of Rome, the 12 tables, were being written. However, the legal year still started in March until 53 BC when the start of the year was officially moved to January 1^st. The reason for this was probably because of a war in Spain. New consuls, the people who governed Rome, were sworn in on the 1^st of March for their one year of service, but because of the war, they had to spend a few months getting to Spain for the war, so they were sworn in earlier. And thus the start of the year became January 1st.

From here on, we have basic calendar history. Julius Ceasar realized the calendar didn’t fit the amount of days, so he had his astronomers fix it, which became the Julian calendar. It was a good try, but it also went gradually out of sync with the seasons, so it had to be fixed again in 1570 when Pope Gregory XIII had the Gregorian calendar created. His biggest worry was that religious festivals were getting too far out of line. His calendar cut out a few days and got everything back on track. Both Ceasar and Pope Gregory used January 1^st for the start of the year.

The Gregorian calendar spread around the world, but England refused to use it. This was down to them disliking the pope and not wanting to be ordered around by Rome. England had split with the Roman Catholic church a few years before this calendar came out and feelings were still raw. Then, as time went on, they just became stubborn. They refused to use the calendar, and they refused to have January 1^st as the start of the year. In Great Britain and her colonies, the year started on March 25^th. March 25^th had been common across Europe to celebrate the Christian festival of the Annunciation, but most other countries had slowly adopted the Gregorian calendar. Britain only decided to adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Their calendar had gone so out of sync with the rest of the world that they had to lose 11 days from September of that year. Many documents written before 1752 in Great Britain have two dates on them to signify what they mean. If they are writing about January, February, or March (before the 25^th), they would say February 10^th 1658/59. This signifies that it is still 1658 on the British calendar but 1659 for the rest of the world. Once they gave up, things became easier. And that is what I learned today.

Try these:

Sources