An invaluable resource for working programmers, as well as a fount of useful algorithmic tools for computer scientists, astronomers, and other calendar enthusiasts, The Ultimate Edition updates and expands the previous edition to achieve more accurate results and present new calendar variants. The book now includes coverage of Unix dates, Italian time, the Akan, Icelandic, Saudi Arabian Umm al-Qura, and Babylonian calendars. There are also expanded treatments of the observational Islamic and Hebrew calendars and brief discussions of the Samaritan and Nepalese calendars. Several of the astronomical functions have been rewritten to produce more accurate results and to include calculations of moonrise and moonset. The authors frame the calendars of the world in a completely algorithmic form, allowing easy conversion among these calendars and the determination of secular and religious holidays. LISP code for all the algorithms is available in machine-readable form.

Expanded coverage includes generic cyclical calendars, astronomical lunar calendars, and the Korean, Vietnamese, Aztec, and Tibetan calendars.

Simultaneously displays the date on thirteen different calendars over a three-hundred year period.

Dates form the backbone of written history. But where do these dates come from? Many different calendars were used in the ancient world. Some of these calendars were based upon observations or calculations of regular astronomical phenomena, such as the first sighting of the new moon crescent that defined the beginning of the month in many calendars, while others incorporated schematic simplifications of these phenomena, such as the 360-day year used in early Mesopotamian administrative practices in order to simplify accounting procedures. Historians frequently use handbooks and tables for converting dates in ancient calendars into the familiar BC/AD calendar that we use today. But very few historians understand how these tables have come about, or what assumptions have been made in their construction. The seven papers in this volume provide an answer to the question what do we know about the operation of calendars in the ancient world, and just as importantly how do we know it? Topics covered include the ancient and modern history of the Egyptian 365-day calendar, astronomical and administrative calendars in ancient Mesopotamia, and the development of astronomical calendars in ancient Greece. This book will be of interest to ancient historians, historians of science, astronomers who use early astronomical records, and anyone with an interest in calendars and their development.

This book takes as its theme the related issues of calendar, chronology and worship, as they were conceived and practised in ancient Jewish and early Christian times. After a general discussion of the way the three issues are related, there follow six chapters on the calendar, first the standard Jewish calendar, then the Qumran calendar (giving particular attention to the Book of Enoch and the Temple Scroll) and finally the Christian calendar - both the standard Christian calendar and that observed by the Montanists. Three chapters on chronology come next, one of them offering a chronological solution to a puzzling calendrical problem in the Dead Sea Scrolls, another relating Jewish eschatological expectations to New Testament teaching, and a third examining the chronological calculations of the Hellenistic Jew Demetrius, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Book of Jubilees. The three concluding chapters, on worship, include an investigation of the historical development of the Psalter and a careful survey of the relationship between ancient Jewish worship and early Christian. The book discusses a variety of issues that arise in modern biblical, intertestamental and patristic study, some neglected, some very controversial, and throws new light upon them.