Eli5:why we use the solar calendar instead of the lunar calendar?
In: Planetary Science
All of these comments are super misinformed about the lunar calendars. They’re basing the flaws of a lunar calendar on the solar calendar without regard to how lunar calendars actually work, and they’re trying to explain the benefits of a solar calendar as the reason for the switch when it’s not even remotely the case.
To actually answer the question, we use a solar calendar because that’s what the Romans used. The Romans used one because they had such a large empire that they needed to standardize their calendar; rather than use 20 different (exaggerated) lunar based calendars, everyone would adopt a uniform solar calendar, because the benefits of everyone being on the same time outweighed the benefits of the local calendar that worked for their lifestyle. A lunar calendar from middle Europe would be useless in Cairo, Egypt, because the climates, hunting and growing seasons are drastically different.
The Roman Empire was so influential that their calendar spread to everyone they had trade relations with, because it was beneficial to keep track of Roman time when most of your money came from Rome. Then, through Roman adoption of Christianity, it further spread as the standard calendar of the Church, and later on entire kingdoms became based on the Church thus the kingdom’s calendars as well. Church power displaced the pockets that still used a lunar calendar, leading to widespread adoption of the Roman calendar for practical purposes like trade, with the lunar calendars becoming reserved for traditional religious ceremonies like Ramadan, Yule, or Passover.
The stated benefits of the solar calendar are a product of the longevity of the calendar itself. Over time all calendars have been improved to more closely match what they’re trying to keep track of. In the case of the Roman calendar, it started out as a 10 month calendar (March to December) with an indeterminate amount of days between the end of December (harvest) and the beginning of March (planting) based on how cold the winter was. This was changed adding January and February at some point, then Caesar standardized the calendar to 365 days with a leap year every 4 years in 40BC, then this was changed in the 1500s to the current system of every 4 years unless divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. (1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 17 18 and 1900 were not)
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