November was the ninth month of the ancient Roman calendar and has retained its name from the Latin word novem meaning ‘nine’.
There are two theories. The first would have you believe that there used to be just 10 months in the Roman calendar. At some point, when they supposedly changed it to 12, the Romans added January and February at the front of the year, which pushed the other 10 months and their names off course. The second would have you believe that there were always 12 months, but New Year’s Day used to be March 1 and the last month of the year was February. But over many decades and centuries, through a series of bureaucratic and political changes, the New Year holiday simply drifted back in the calendar until it landed on Jan. 1.
Amelia Carolina Sparavigna is a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy and has conducted archaeo-astronomical studies to chart the precise lunar phases of ancient Rome’s calendars. Interestingly, under the 10-month theory, the months weren’t longer, she said. The Romans simply didn’t bother to mark or measure the days in what we call now January and February because little to no agriculture happened in those months, and calendars at that time were developed primarily for farmers. “After a gap in the winter, the year started from Martius,” she told Live Science.
But the Romans were a notoriously organized bunch, so why would they introduce two new months and then simply ignore the fact that many of their other named months no longer made sense? Well, the answer could be that naming conventions were a bit of a political quagmire back then — lots of people in power were jostling to rename months to aggrandize their origins. Emperor Caligula, for example, tried to have September changed to “Germanicus” in honor of his father, Sparavigna said. Emperor Domitian also had a go and tried to turn October into Domitianus.
But none of this went down terribly well with the Roman public, who as it turned out, were fairly conservative and didn’t take well to change for change’s sake. “These changes of names apparently lasted for a very short time,” Sparavigna said. This aversion to change makes sense — after all, many of us today still resist changes to the way we measure things; the metric system is far from universal — and could partly explain why the authorities didn’t alter the naming system when they introduced January and February.
Credit : Live Science
Picture Credit : Google
