Was the lunar calendar invented in China?

Gregorian calendar, lunar calendar and combined calendar of yin and yang.

The solar calendar is also called the Gregorian calendar.

The solar calendar is widely used at present. The solar calendar is formulated according to the cycle of the sun's movement, which is embodied in the four-season cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter. It takes a year for the earth to go around the sun. This year is called tropic year or solar year. The solar calendar is also called solar calendar, Gregorian calendar, Gregorian calendar and Gregorian calendar.

[julian calendar]

To know the origin of the name Gregorian calendar, we have to start from julian calendar. In 46 BC, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar hired an Egyptian astronomer, Sol Sinnis, to study calendars. According to Sothenis' calculation, there should be 365.25 days in a year. So the emperor stipulated that a year is 365 days, and the remaining quarter of a day is solved by adding 1 day every four years, that is, "1 leap year", and the leap year is 366 days. He also stipulated that a year is 12 months, a single month is 3 1 day, and a bimonthly is 30 days, so the whole year is ***366 days, which is exactly the number of days in leap years, and the average year must be reduced by 1 day.

So from which month do you subtract 1 day? Legend has it that in ancient Rome, the death penalty was executed in February. The ancient Romans generally believed that February was a "bad month" and hoped that the fewer unlucky days were the better, so they decided to subtract 1 day from February, leaving 29 days in February and only 30 days in leap years. When the emperor made the calendar, he also put a little selfishness into it. Because he was born in July, he named July Julian month, from which the present English word "July" evolved. This is an early solar calendar called julian calendar.

After Julius Caesar died, his adopted son Augustus Octavian succeeded to the throne. The new emperor found that Julius Caesar was born in July, which is a big month, and he was born in August, which is a small month. In contrast, it was beneath my dignity, so I ordered August to be changed to big month and named it Augustus month. Today, the English word "August" evolved from this. After such changes, the annual increase of 1 day. Therefore, according to the method of the first emperor, subtract 1 day from unlucky February, and the result is that there are only 28 days left in February in normal years and 29 days in leap years. Moreover, since September, bimonthly has been changed to big month, and the original law of big month and small month has also been disrupted. Later, I don't know who invented the "fist memory method": the raised part of the fist back bone is the big moon, and the sunken part is the small moon. Since then, the order of months and months in a year and the number of days in each month have been fixed and have been used ever since.

Julian calendar modified by Augustus Octavian has been in use for a long time, but it is still found to be defective. 1576, according to an accurate calculation by an Italian astronomer, the exact time for the earth to revolve around the sun should be 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds (365.2422 days). If every year is 365 days, four years add up to 23 hours, 15 minutes and 04 seconds, less than 24 hours. Julian calendar adopts the method of "four years 1 leap", that is, it increases 1 day (24 hours) every four years, 44 minutes and 56 seconds more than the actual situation. On average, it will be 1 1 minute 14 seconds more every year, which is 3.65438+ every 400 years.

[Gregorian calendar]

In order to improve the accuracy of the calendar and eliminate the accumulated errors, Pope Gregory XIII organized a group of astronomers to study how to revise the julian calendar in A.D. 1582. According to the research results, there are two main points in the final revision: First, the day after 1582 10.4 (should be 10.5) is set to 10.00 15, so as to eliminate julian calendar to1580. This is what some articles mentioned: "Why did the historical 10 day disappear?" Reason. The second is to modify the leap rule. In addition to retaining the original stipulation that "any year divisible by 4 is a leap year" in julian calendar, a supplementary stipulation has been made for century years (that is, years with the last two digits of "00"), that is, only years divisible by 400 are leap years, such as 2000, 2 100, 2200 and 2300. The new rules can prevent the original accumulated errors from happening in the future. Later, it was stipulated that 4000 was not a leap year, so 4000 had exactly 969 leap years.

The accuracy of the revised julian calendar has been greatly improved. This achievement should be attributed to Gregory XIII, so julian calendar is called Gregorian calendar for short. The length of a Gregorian calendar year is 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes 12 seconds, which is only 26 seconds away from the average length of the tropic year. It takes more than 3320 years to produce an error of 1 day. Because of its high accuracy, the Gregorian calendar is gradually adopted by many countries and becomes a universal calendar, so it is called the Gregorian calendar. However, the Gregorian calendar is not ideal. First, the number of days in each month is inconsistent and unevenly distributed, with a difference of about 3 days between the second half and the first half. Second, there is no definite correspondence between the date and the week, so it is not convenient to record the day.

The lunar calendar is not a lunar calendar.

Some people say that "the lunar calendar is the lunar calendar, and the lunar calendar is also called the lunar calendar", while others think that "the 24 solar terms correspond to the lunar calendar". In fact, these are all misunderstandings.

[lunar calendar]

The lunar calendar records months and years according to the movement cycle of the moon. In ancient times, people saw the sun rise in the east and set in the west every day, which was very convenient and clear for marking the date; And for a longer period of time? People see that the moon, which has an influence on many phenomena, has obvious periodic changes, so they set the profit and loss of the moon as one month at a time. Because the average period of the moon's gain and loss is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 03 seconds (29.5306 days), they set the abortion as 29 days, the big month as 30 days, and1February as 65438. Because the moon is also called the lunar calendar, the calendar that changes according to the phases of the moon is called the lunar calendar. This calendar was used in ancient Egypt. Because the length of the lunar year is 354.3672 days, which is 10.875 days less than that of the return, so it will probably appear in the hot summer after 17. The reason for this phenomenon is that the movement of the sun is not considered in the calendar.

[lunar calendar]

Lunar calendar is a long-standing traditional calendar in China. Also called summer calendar, middle calendar and old calendar. It not only considers the change of the moon's profit and loss, but also considers the relative position of the sun and the earth. It is a new moon ("new moon" refers to the moon running between the earth and the sun, appearing and disappearing at the same time as the sun. This moment is called "new moon", the moon at this time is called new moon, and the day when the new moon appears is called new moon. "Looking" means that the earth is between the sun and the moon, and the moon is facing the earth and full of sunshine. The moon is round, so it is called full moon or full moon, and the day when the full moon appears is called full moon. It is called "Shuowangyue", and its average length is the same as the lunar calendar, which is the time required for the moon to present the same phase twice in a row, that is, 29.5306 days. The lunar calendar also adopts the method of setting leap months to adjust the relationship between months and seasonal changes, thus overcoming the defects of the lunar calendar and making the average length of the lunar year close to the tropic year.

In the lunar calendar, the 24 solar terms, which can well reflect the position of the sun, are properly distributed in each month, thus strengthening the seasonality of the calendar and making it have stable seasonal characteristics, and the 24 solar terms have become an important part of the lunar calendar. The lunar calendar emphasizes daily and monthly calculation. Unlike the solar calendar, you can't artificially specify which month is older and which month is younger or how many days there are in a month. Instead, we must follow the principle of "according to the date sequence of the month", that is, the day when the sun meets the moon (the moment when the new moon appears) is the first day of each month, but whether this month is big or small must be determined by calculation. If the sun and the moon meet at half past five today, today is the first day of the first month, tomorrow is the second day, the day after tomorrow is the third day, and so on; If the second day falls on the 30th, that day is the first day of the second month, and the first month is an abortion (29 days). If the third day of next month happens to be the 60th day, that day is the first day of the third month, and the second month is designated as the big month (30 days). Because the sun, the moon and the earth interact in motion, the distance between them is far or near, and the time when the sun and the moon meet is late or early, which leads to the length of Wang Shuo's moon being long or short (long in winter and short in summer), and there may be two or three small months or three or four big months in a row. So it is not surprising that there is no New Year's Eve in some lunar years, and there is New Year's Eve on the 29th of the twelfth lunar month.

Twenty-four solar terms are an outstanding creation of China historians and unique to China. As early as the Spring and Autumn Period, our ancestors had used the standard meter (ancient astronomical instruments) to measure the sun's shadow, and determined the four solar terms "vernal equinox" (that is, vernal equinox and autumnal equinox) and "second solstice" (that is, summer solstice and winter solstice), and then determined the "four solar terms" (that is, beginning of spring, Changchun, beginning of autumn and beginning of winter). By the Qin and Han dynasties, they had formed a complete 24 solar terms and became.