I’m trying to get a sense of approximately when and/or where in human culture people have come up with the idea of holding festivities on a particular date of the year to commemorate the (more or less) random occurrence of some important event on the same date in some previous year.
We’re talking birthdays (royal or commoner), commemorations of famous battles or the founding of cities, whatever. Some special event that took place on some arbitrary date that wasn’t considered special for calendric purposes, but had enough of an impact historically or personally to make that arbitrary date a time of annual celebration.
Note that I’m specifically not asking about annual celebrations based on seasonal or astronomical phenomena that were viewed as important features of the yearly calendar, such as equinoxes or solstices. I want to know when the concept of having a party every year on some arbitrary date associated with a one-off special event, such as a birth, marriage, battle, etc., became A Thing.
Subject to correction, I don’t think that attested ancient observances like Passover in the Old Testament or the Dionysia in classical Greece count for this purpose, since they seem to have originated as seasonal festivals that only later became associated with important legendary or historical events.
So have at it, Doperdom: who invented the birthday party and its ilk?
I don’t understand why you would consider a birthday or the anniversary of some other historical event to be arbitrary. That event DID occur on that date, and I see nothing arbitrary about it. What better time is there to celebrate the event than on its anniversary?
Perhaps you are referring to events where we do not know exactly when they occurred, so an arbitrary date is chosen for the celebration. If that’s your question, here’s my guess of an answer: Such things happened AFTER the idea of anniversaries for known dates became customary. Then, when an event happened, whose anniversary was considered important enough to celebrate, but they didn’t know the exactly correct date, they chose one arbitrarily.
Sorry, I mean that the original occurrence of the celebrated event was arbitrary, i.e., random with regard to the structure of the annual calendar.
The point is that the yearly celebration of this event is not just some kind of seasonal solstice/harvest/whatever festival with some historical or legendary associations added to spice it up a bit. We’re talking the establishment of an annual party that is solely about commemorating a one-off event that occurred on some random date.
Does that make more sense than my original phrasing?
The Festival of Purim is a simple example. Thought its origin is probably completely fake (like much history in the Torah) it does get celebrated on a particular date.
When did it start? Well given it’s most likely fake, probably about the time someone wrote the book of Esther and included it - I guess getting on to 3000 years ago.
For more fact based anniversaries you can’t go past the many Ancient Greek Festivals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries or even the Olympic Games.
Their dates may have been recorded as some part of a Season, but the topic of the Festivals was usually unrelated to the season.
The Elusinian Mysteries ( starting around 3500 years ago) were (from wikipedia)
“as a rule once a year in the early spring in the month of flowers, the Anthesterion,” while “the Greater Mysteries were held once a year and every fourth year they were celebrated with special splendor in what was known as the penteteris.”
The Sun Room at Hovenweep Castle, in the American Southwest, was built in about 1277, and has marks for the position of the rising sun on various dates. The solstices and equinoxes are among these, but there are also some others. I don’t think it’s known what the significance of those other dates is-- They might be dates for various agricultural activities (when to plow, when to sow, and so on), or they might be anniversaries.
I was thinking of Passover, along similar lines. Do we know which one started being celebrated earlier? I know the Bible places the origin of Passover earlier than the story of Esther.
Some might find both Passover and Purim suspiciously close to the Spring equinox. Of course, the equinoxes and solstices have been hijacked by many religions.
Perhaps an answer to the OP might come from when the daily (rather than seasonal) calendar was invented?
Well, that’s gotta go back to at least the second or third millennium BCE, AFAIK, based on evidence from early second-millennium cuneiform tables that use day numbers to reference celestial observations.
How about the “universal” part of the question? Does anybody know of any culture that does not celebrate any annual commemorations of calendrically random, i.e., non-seasonal, special events? Such as birthdays, historical anniversaries, etc.?
That was my thought. Once a calendar was invented, then it would be logical to mark anniversaries. “His emperorness has been on the throne for exactly a year. We should celebrate!”
Of course, now we get into the evolution of the calendar. Since the moon and the sun don’t line up neatly, it would be a major step to jump from lunar cycles to annual solar ones, with arbitrary made-up “months”.
“Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that 40% of our sick days are taken on Monday or Friday! This is highly suspicious and unacceptable!”
See, now that’s the part I don’t get. Why would it be automatically “logical” or natural to “mark anniversaries” of dates of specific randomly-occurring events that have nothing to do with the natural cycles of the calendar?
Why would anybody be inclined to notice that “his emperorness has been on the throne for exactly a year” any more than “his emperorness has been on the throne for exactly one hundred days” or some other interval?
We moderns are so firmly entrenched in the anniversaries-of-special-events mindset that it may seem natural to us to say “We should celebrate” just because the length of one year has elapsed since the occurrence of some one-off happening. But I don’t see anything particularly “logical” about that mindset and I’m not convinced it’s intrinsically natural to human thought.
So I’d like to know more about any evidence we have for how it got started and whether there are any known human societies that don’t participate in it.
But Purim has some things in common with the Persian festival of Nowruz, which is based on an astronomical event. There is a theory that Purim may ultimately derive from Nowruz. The astronomical determination of the date might have been lost when transferring from the Persian to the Jewish calendar. Or you might just have two holidays that were near each other in the year, and one borrowed some customs from the other, a la Hanukkah and Christmas. Hanukkah isn’t derived from Christmas (or vice versa), but they do share some customs, especially in places where Jews and Christians live in proximity. It’s possible that there is a similar relationship between Purim and Nowruz.
You could also quibble that, since the Jewish calendar is based on (among other things) the phases of the moon, every holiday in the Jewish calendar has some astronomical basis. Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day), while it clearly does commemorate a historical event and doesn’t celebrate anything astronomical, is always going to be celebrated at the same phase of the moon, at around the same time in the solar year, just because of how the Jewish calendar works. The Muslim calendar is also based on the moon (but not on the seasons), so the same argument could apply to Muslim holidays. I believe the traditional Chinese calendar also incorporates moon phases into determining the date.
You could argue that the dating of Easter in the Western Christian calendar has an astronomical basis- it’s celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (well, almost). That’s two astronomical events used to calculate it right there. But there is also an element that isn’t connected to an astronomical event- it has to be on a Sunday. Wesak/Vesak (Buddha Day or Buddha’s birthday) is celebrated in a lot of different countries with different calendars, and there are different ways of calculating when it should be (it’s celebrated at different times in different places). In some places, it’s on a full moon in May (more or less, sometimes it’s in late April or early June)- part astronomical, part not. In Taiwan, it’s on the second Sunday of May, and in Japan it’s on April 8, which are not astronomically determined at all. Can it be a non-astronomically-determined holiday in one place, but not in another, even though it’s commemorating the same thing? Christians and Buddhists respectively believe that Easter and Vesak commemorate historical events, not astronomical ones, although astronomical events are (in some cases) used to determine the dates of these festivals.
The date of Christmas is not set by any astronomical events. But the date of Christmas may borrow from Saturnalia, which was astronomically based.
My point is, where do you draw the line? What if a holiday used to have an astronomical basis, or derives from a holiday that did, but now it’s on a fixed date? What if there are some astronomical events and some non-astronomical considerations that go into calculating the date of the holiday? What if the calendar itself is based on astronomical events, as the Jewish, Muslim, and traditional Chinese calendars are? Can you have a holiday sufficiently unconnected to astronomical events in that case?
Any society that has involved itself in astronomy, agriculture, or has significant seasonal climate patterns would be aware of the passage of the years. In such cultures, the passage of years would be clearly defined and could be referenced at any moment, ie if you knew that it was mid-summer when event A happened and now it seems to be mid-autumn, you know that 1/4th of a year has passed. Unless you were explicitly counting days, an interval of 100 days would be much harder to count, as the seasons or stars would be useless for trying to gauge the passage of time. Really, I think we use a year based system because it’s universal and convenient. It allows us to say something like “This child is 1 year old”, which allows us to compare it to another child of the same age, which might be useful in tracking the growth and health of your children. Many cultures consider children adults when they reach a certain age. Basically, things change over time and using a clear system of time allows us to track and measure that change. Understanding the world around us is a basic desire for humans.
I think your right. Looking at lists of Ancient Egyptian Holidays, they seem to be largely liturgical celebrations of Cyclical religious events, rather than anniversaries of historical (or even mythological) events. I don’t think the idea is particularity obvious, especially in cultures that tend to emphasize institutions as ancient or timeless, rather than the result of particular historical events.
Are there non-Astronomical Calendars? Even the modern calendar is based on the motion of the Sun. So I don’t think there’s such a thing as a non-astronomical anniversary in that sense.
But I think the OP is asking what the first holiday to be tied to commemorating the recurrence of the date of a particular historical (or even mythological) event on an astronomical calendar (like Easter) rather than holidays which are celebrating dates purely for their astronomical significance (like the Winter Solstace or a Harvest Festival).
Yes, I understand the reasoning behind using calendar systems to track temporal change, and also basing calendar systems on naturally occurring time cycles, such as the year, the (lunar) month, and the day.
None of that is what I’m talking about here. What’s got me wondering is the phenomenon—which still doesn’t seem at all automatically obvious or “natural” to me—of instituting annual commemorative celebrations of a specific one-time event whose occurrence was unrelated to the natural cycles of the calendar.
As other posters have pointed out, it’s hard to separate the concept of an annual celebration of a non-cyclic event from the annual festivals marking the cyclic events that happen to occur at about the same time, but I’m still not convinced that it’s in any way “obvious” or “logical” to think up the former just because your society already does the latter.
Solstice-- Doesn’t count, because it’s inherently tied to the calendar, and couldn’t be any other time of year.
Harvest Festival-- Doesn’t count, because given the climate and farming practices, it has to be at one particular time of year, and couldn’t be any other.
Emperor’s Birthday-- Counts, because the Emperor could have been born on any day at all, and his birthday would still be an equally-valid holiday no matter what day it was.
Commemoration of the Victory over Other Tribe-- Counts, because the battle against Other Tribe could have been any day at all, and it’s equally worth celebrating no matter when it was.
Quite right. Personal anniversaries (celebrations of birthdays, wedding anniversaries, even the day of someone’s death if your culture’s into that) would also count, since they’re not seasonally linked.
The gray area is when the legend says that you’re celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the city or the great battle or the birth of the savior or whatever, but it happens to fall on or around the time of a seasonal festival. Clearly the legend must post-date the introduction of a custom of celebrating non-seasonal anniversaries, since it assumes that that custom is the reason for the festival, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the festival itself isn’t just an ancient seasonal festival that got updated.
Trecena is Spanish, I have no idea what the pre-Columbian Aztec would be but that would be an amazing coincidence (it could be that they are called trecenas among Aztec speakers now, by influence of Spanish).