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[Alexandr Korol]

West (referring to Sicily and Italy) also divided the year into three seasons, calling winter Cronus, summer Aphrodite, and spring Persephone.” You see? There was no autumn. Each of the three seasons had four months. “Tacitus, in his book Germania, reports that the peoples living between the Rhine and Danube rivers ‘did not know’ autumn. Their year consisted of winter, spring, and summer.” It is also fascinating how, in all these ancient calendars, such as the Tibetan one, each day of the week had a symbolic meaning – for example, Monday was the Moon, and Sunday was the Sun. And in ancient China, the year was divided into 24 seasons. Now, I am categorizing all these groups, organizing everything, and comparing where the correlations lie. Because here’s what’s interesting – if we talk about the ancient Egyptian calendar, it states that: “The time interval between two heliacal risings of Sirius, which in ancient Egypt coincided with the summer solstice and preceded the flooding of the Nile, was 365.25 days. However, the Egyptians set their year as a whole number – 365 days. Thus, every four years, seasonal events lagged behind the calendar by one day. In the absence of leap years, the New Year would cycle through all the seasons over a span of 1,460 years (365 × 4) and return to its original date. This period of 1,460 years was called the Sothic period, cycle, or the Great Year of Sothis.” Why am I emphasizing this? All ancient civilizations struggled and tried to make sense of why some years had more days, some had fewer, and how they accounted for this extra day. In some years, there were more days, in others fewer, and each civilization had its own legends and explanations for how they calculated and adjusted for this – this is all about the leap year, which is also very interesting. And again, here’s this: “In ancient Egypt, the official calendar divided the year into three seasons, each consisting of four months: The season of inundation (Akhet) – from mid-July to mid-November; the season of emergence (Peret) – from mid-November to mid-March; The season of drought (Shemu) – from mid-March to mid-July. The months were numbered (First Month of Inundation, Second Month of Inundation, and so on). Each month had 30 days (without any connection to the lunar phases). The Egyptians knew that the year was not 360 days but 365, so the remaining five days, which did not fit into the calendar, were added at the end of the last month. These days were called heriu- renpet, which literally meant ‘those that are above the year.’ Each of these days was celebrated as the birthday of a deity: Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys.” You see how they emphasized this. But there was something else particularly