solar calendar

solar calendar, any dating system based on the seasonal year of approximately 365 1/4 days, the time it takes the Earth to revolve once around the Sun. The Egyptians appear to have been the first to develop a solar calendar, using as a fixed point the annual sunrise reappearance of the Dog Star—Sirius, or Sothis—in the eastern sky, which coincided with the annual flooding of the Nile River. They constructed a calendar of 365 days, consisting of 12 months of 30 days each, with 5 days added at the year’s end. The Egyptians’ failure to account for the extra fraction of a day, however, caused their calendar to drift gradually into error.

Ptolemy III Euergetes of Egypt, in the Decree of Canopus (237 bc), introduced an extra day every four years to the basic 365-day calendar (this practice also having been introduced in the Seleucid calendar adopted in 312 bc). In the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar in 45 bc replaced the confused Roman republican calendar, which probably was based on the lunar calendar of the Greeks, with the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar assigned 30 or 31 days to 11 months but fewer to February; it allowed for a leap year every four years. The Julian calendar, however, made the solar year slightly too long by adding a full quarter of a day annually—the solar year actually runs 365.2422 days. By mid-16th century the extra time had resulted in an accumulated error of about 10 days. To correct this error, Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, dropping October 5–14 that year and omitting leap years when they fell on centurial years not divisible by 400—e.g., 1700, 1800, 1900.