The Calendar

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the calendar, which shapes the lives of millions of people. It is an invention that gives meaning to the passing of time and orders our daily existence. It links us to the arcane movements of the heavens and the natural rhythms of the earth. It is both deeply practical and profoundly sacred. But where does this strange and complex creation come from? Why does the week last seven days but the year twelve months? Who named these concepts and through them shaped our lives so absolutely? The answers involve Babylonian Astronomers and Hebrew Theologians, Roman Emperors and Catholic Popes. If the calendar is a house built on the shifting sands of time, it has had many architects.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Robert Poole No other episodes
  Reader in History at St Martin's College Lancaster
• Kristen Lippincott 3 episodes
  Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich
• Peter Watson No other episodes
  Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University

Related episodes

• The Measurement of Time
  
  29 Mar, 2012 520 Astronomy
• Time
  
  30 Dec, 1999 110 Metaphysics
• Meteorology
  
  6 Mar, 2003 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Circadian Rhythms
  
  17 Dec, 2015 570 Biology
• Renaissance Astrology
  
  14 Jun, 2007 130 Parapsychology and occultism
• Ptolemy and Ancient Astronomy
  
  17 Nov, 2011 520 Astronomy
• Automata
  
  20 Sep, 2018 600 Technology
• Ageing the Earth
  
  20 Nov, 2003 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
  
  8 Apr, 2021 510 Mathematics
• The Earth’s Origins
  
  5 Jul, 2001 500 Science

---

Programme ID: p00548m9

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548m9

Auto-category: 529 (Chronology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The calendar shapes the lives of millions of people.