Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Coligny Calendar

From English Historical Fiction Authors:
The Coligny Calendar is an engraved copper alloy tablet which was originally 1.48 metres wide and 0.9 metres high. It is broken and incomplete, but the 73 fragments preserved in the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon gives us a great deal of information about how the calendar was structured. It dates to the late 2nd Century AD, by which time Lyon and its surrounding district was, in most respects, thoroughly Romanised, yet the months it lists are not the familiar ones of the Julian Calendar.

Presumably it mattered, at least to some people, to keep in mind the calendar of their pre-Roman ancestors. Since Julius Caesar and other writers emphasise the unity of Gaulish and British culture, with druids moving freely across tribal boundaries, the likelihood is that this calendar, or some variant of it, applied in Britain just as it did in Gaul. (Read more.)
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