Nor need we throw discredit on the early calendar makers 6,000 B.C., if we take for granted that they were not acquainted with the fact that slowly but inevitably the seasons must change their position amongst the stars, and that, not knowing this, they believed that in making the beginning of the year dependent on the sun’s entry into the constellation Aries, they were also binding it to the season of the winter solstice.
As centuries rolled by, however, and slowly the stars of Aries receded from the winter solstice, Bar zig-gar was no longer the first month in the sense of being the first winter month. Still, the authority of the originators of the calendar held sway; provision had been only made for counting the year as a sidereal year; and Bar zig-gar, or the month in which the sun entered Aries, was still called the first month, and looked on as the beginning of the year.
To carry out the reformation of any long established calendar is, we know, not a trifling undertaking. Even on secular grounds, any proposed reform encounters strong opposition. But the calendar in Babylonia was not only a civil, it was also a religious, institution. Its origin was attributed to the Creator, and as the work of the Creator, it is described in one of the old Babylonian tablets.[9]
[9] Records of the Past. New series. Vol. i. p. 145.
“For each of the twelve months He fixed three stars” (or groups of stars). “From the day when the year issues forth to the close.”[10]
[10] In modern works we find the terms “useless,” “fanciful,” and “inconvenient,” applied to the Zodiac and its constellations; and for regulating a tropical year the constellations are “useless” and “inconvenient,” but the theory that the reckoning of the year and all its religious festivals depended on the observance of the Zodiacal star-groups, would help to account for the widely spread veneration in which they were held throughout so many ages and by so many nations.
The astronomical and astrological texts drawn up for Sargon of Accad are entitled “The Illumination of Bel,”[11] and still as late as the second century B.C., all Babylonian almanacs bore the heading: “At the command of my Lord Bel and my Lady Beltis, a decree.”[12] Thus it was, we may suppose, that under the protection of the gods the Accadian calendar continued unchanged throughout all the changing ages.
[11] Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 1874, pp. 150, 151.
[12] Epping and Strassmaier, Astronomisches aus Babylon, p. 161. (Auf Geheiss von Bel und Beltis meiner Herrin, eine Entscheidung.)
But during all the ages the winter solstice moved on steadily through almost a quarter of the great circle of the ecliptic,[13] and in the second century B.C., the spring equinox was not far from the same point of the star-marked ecliptic where the winter solstice had been when first the calendar-makers had “fixed” the constellations “for the twelve months from the day when the year issues forth to the close,” and we who now read the almanacs drawn up at that late period of Babylonian history are not (as has been said above) surprised to find the year “beginning with Nisan, hence in the spring.” (See [Plate I.], [fig. 2].)