The Old Farmer’s Almanac pages still give the dates of the Roman indiction-which was a fiscal/tax cycle established by the Roman emperor Diocletian.
I wonder why it still shows up in the calendar section-is this 18 year cycle still in use?
BTW, are any nations still using the old Julian Calendar?
I don’t think any nations still do (it’d be pretty inconveniant for them to be out of syche with the rest of the world), but IIRC, some factions of the Eastern Orthodox Church still set holidays by the Julian calander, and so their holidays very slowly drift through the year relative to the Gregorian calander.
Nations no, but it’s still in use in a religious context. A lot of Orthodox churches (there is, to my knowledge, not one Orthodox Church with factions; rather, there’s a Greek Orthodox Church, a Russian Orthodox Church, etc, all of which may be theologically and liturgically similar but not affiliated organisationally) use the Julian Calendar (which is why, incidentally, these Churches have Christmas Day today). I don’t know of any contemporary secular usage of the Julian Calendar.
The indiction was established by Constantine and was a 15-year cycle. It is not currently used for anything but remains part of the computus by tradition.
The Indiction for each year up to 2060 is included in the calendar of a newly published Breviary that I recently bought. I don’t think it serves any specific purpose. I suspect it’s there more because the format of the liturgical calendar in breviaries has included it for hundreds of years and nobody felt the need to remove it. In other words, ‘tradition’ as mentioned by Maeglin.
Ethiopia doesn’t use the Julian calendar but it is out of sync with the rest of the world - it’s currently 2003 there.
But that’s not really out of sync, it’s simply a different calendar. To me, being out of sync would imply that the calendar looks, on surface, to be the same (using same names for the months, for instance), but still results in a different denomination for a given day. If today is January 8, 2011 in the Gregorian calendar, but Tahsas 30, 2003 in the Ethiopian calendar and Safar 2, 1432 in the Islamic calendar, then the latter two calendars are not out of sync with the first, they’re simply wholly different systems.
Of course, the Ethiopian one is particularly confusing, since it uses year numbers that are sufficiently close to their Gregorian counterparts to make a foreigner who casually reads a date believe that it could be Gregorian, making mix-ups more likely.
True. Thailand fits the bill, kind of, in that it uses the Gregorian calendar but numbers the years 543 higher than the usual western numbering. So today is January 8, 2554 in Thailand.