Depends on the time we’re talking about. Do we mean prehistory? Then I agree with you; prehistoric non-priests would have a general understanding of the passing of a year but would not keep count of exact dates. Or so we also admit, for instance, classical Rome (which certainly qualifies as antiquity)? Because in that period, calendar usage was widespread; we know the exact birthdates (day and year) for many Roman individuals, so records must have been kept.
To answer another of the OP’s subquestions, I highly doubt people would have had an intuitive feeling on their birthday that this was actually their birthday. Where would auch a feeling come from?
I think it’s highly plausible that your average prehistoric person knew at the very least what season they were born in. A person born shortly after the first snow fall might possibly know, when the first snow falls each year, that it is some kind of anniversary of their birth. If they were born near an annual festival I think it’s likely that they would know or at least associate the anniversary of birth with proximity to the festival. In societies where lay people interact with astrologers, the person might possibly know under which constellation they were born.
Yes, agricultural societies have a strong need to know the season and approximate date. But I believe that even pre-agricultural, pre-herding human communities needed to know the season – and did.
Birds migrate on a schedule. Trees put out leaves and flowers, and then drop their leaves on a schedule. It can’t possibly have been too hard for humans to know when in the year it was. Although I agree with you that weather and season matter more than precise dates.
Early humans need to know the time of year, not necessarily the exact date, but within a week or so because their food, and their lives, depend upon it. Such things as the deer are shedding the velvet from their horns, one more moon and they will enter the rut and be easier to hunt. When they lose their horns in the spring the new generation will be born soon. Things like that are important if you would like to eat.
I have been watching the bird migrations recently. The barn swallows were lining up on the power lines a few weeks ago and I thought, they will be leaving that week, and they did. In the spring the cliff and tree swallows will return earliest, that means the barn swallows will be back in couple of weeks later. I live next to a Bonneville power line (major supply lines) and it is like a super highway for migrating birds. I have seen groups of hundreds or thousands of swallows using the lines to follow heading south. Followed shortly by various raptors following them. The swallows need to get south before they run out of flying insects to eat, and the raptors follow before they run out of birds to eat.
My point is that things don’t really change much year to year, they happen about the same time each year. A warm and sunny fall will not make the animals too complacent to follow their food, same with humans.
I am Og, born in the second week of February when the daffodils push up out of the ground, as they do each and every year in my place. Wet winter, cold winter, snow or warm rain, the daffodils will push up out of the ground the second week of February next year regardless, they won’t be late…
Ancient peoples knew what time of year it was within very tight parameters, maybe not the exact date, or maybe they did, they were not only observers of nature but actual participants who were part of the environment they lived in. When the shamans and priests learned to be more precise, this knowledge gave them power.
There is no beginning, and there is no end. The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go. The days, months, and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow, and frost. The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring. The earth spins through the vastness of space. The grass comes and goes with the warmth of the sun. The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape.
I don’t think that’s an intuitive connection for a prehistoric person. The seasons are cyclical but a human lifespan is linear. Unless there was a religious reason, why would they associate the two?
The daffodils here don’t come up while the ground is still frozen, let alone while it’s still got two feet of snow on it. And the date of thawed ground, among a lot of other things, does vary from year to year.
There’s a whole body of lore, most of which I don’t know, relating the growth of various wild things to the time to plant specific crops, and I expect also relating the readily visible growth of some things to the time to go hunting less immediately visible ones, as well as predicting from the growth stage of one thing how soon it’ll be possible to harvest something else. But it’s not going to give you a specific date. Star patterns are going to be a lot closer for that.
– Not only can I not think of any mechanism by which people could instinctively know when their birthdays are, I can see massive amounts of evidence against it. Plenty of people in historical times, as has been noted multiple times in the thread, don’t know the year of their birth, let alone the day. And not all societies have our current obsession with hanging an exact number on everything.
In the other direction, they might well know because they kept hearing their mother tell the story of how good it was that they’d been safely into winter quarters before she went into labor, or how hard it was to be pregnant all that long hot summer, or other things of that sort.
Shared numbering of years is something we take totally for granted, but it’s actually pretty recent. It was only in the 6th century (see how the numbering of that century is taken for granted) that years from Christ’s birth started to be used in Europe.
In the past it was very difficult to refer to a specific year.
From Caesar’s Calendar by Denis Feeney:
When Diodorus Siculus wishes to mark the beginning of ‘384 BCE’ he says, “At the conclusion of the year, in Athens Diotrephes was archon and in Rome the consuls elected were Lucius Valerius and Aulus Mallius, and the Eleians celebrated the ninety-ninth Olympiad, that in which Dicon of Syracuse won the footrace”.
Comparable mechanisms are observable in all literate societies that have no universalizing numerical dating system but have chancelleries or historians who must make correlations outside the penumbra of their own state.
A historian working in Asia who wanted to describe events in what we call 936 CE. would be using the following synchronisms: “In China, Shi Jingtang destroyed the Latter Tang Dynasty and became Emperor Gaozu of the Latter Jin, inaugurating year one of the Tianfu (‘Heavenly Felicity’) Era. Meanwhile, Wang T’aejo unified the Korean peninsula under the Koryo Dynasty in his 19th regnal year. In Japan, in the sixth year of Jo-hei (‘Consenting in Peace’) Era, under Emperor Suzaku, Kino Yoshihito and Fujiwara no Sumitomo fought pirates off the southwest coast of Japan. It was the 33rd year of the 60-year cycle of the zodiac: the Year of the Fiery Monkey.”
Even to work out that the year that Diodorus Siculus was referring to was what we now call 384 BCE, took many years of dedicated work by scholars.
Without a universal agreed numbering system for years, it’s far from trivial to keep track of which year an event happened in.
In pre-literate cultures that would have been even more the case.
Many such things vary by more than one calendar week though. Just to use one easily accessible dataset, the earliest and latest date for peak cherry blossom bloom in Washington D.C. have differed by almost a month for the last 100 years.
A warm and sunny fall means the food is still there later and may very well delay migration for many species.
Climate change is changing migration patterns and messing up relationships between different species that rely on different cues for when and if to migrate, sprout, bloom, but few plants and animals are completely independent on weather and local short term swings in climate.
That is far less true in Ireland than it may be where you live. There is huge weather-driven variation from year to year in the timing of events such as daffodils being in bloom, hawthorn trees coming into leaf, blackberries being ripe, etc., and within any year these events happen over an extended period rather than all at once. It’s not impossible for daffodils to bloom in December, or in May. The range of dates over which you can plant potatoes or beans and get a successful harvest extends for months.
We also have far less distinct seasons than continental regions do. The weather on a given day in June can be exactly the same as a given day in November. If you walk outside and the temperature is 12 degrees C, the sky is overcast and there is a light drizzle, it could be literally any day of the year.
All of which is not to say that our ancient ancestors were unaware of the cycle of the seasons, just that it’s not universally the case that you can pin down the date within 10 days by observing nature.
This isn’t prehistoric, but it’s in one of the very first histories. According to Herodotus, “the father of history”, writing in 430 BCE, the ancient Persians celebrated birthdays, implying that they weren’t as important to the ancient Greeks. He describes a Persian birthday feast:
“Of all the days in the year, the one which they celebrate most is
their birthday. It is customary to have the board furnished on that
day with an ampler supply than common. The richer Persians cause an
ox, a horse, a camel, and an ass to be baked whole and so served up
to them: the poorer classes use instead the smaller kinds of cattle.
They eat little solid food but abundance of dessert, which is set
on table a few dishes at a time; this it is which makes them say that
“the Greeks, when they eat, leave off hungry, having nothing worth
mention served up to them after the meats; whereas, if they had more
put before them, they would not stop eating.” They are very fond of
wine, and drink it in large quantities.” http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.mb.txt
And an article about ancient Zoroastrians/Persians:
About their calendar, Wikipedia says that “The earliest evidence of Iranian calendrical traditions is from the second millennium BC and possibly even predates the appearance of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster. The first fully preserved calendar is that of the Achaemenids, a royal dynasty of the 5th century BC who gave rise to Zoroastrianism. Throughout recorded history, Persians have been keen on the idea and importance of having a calendar. They were among the first cultures to use a solar calendar”
Ancient Romans traditionally referred to a year by the two consuls that held office in that year (this tradition even continued into imperial times, when consuls were often mere figureheads, but the consulate still carried enough prestige to maintain the practice). It’s more cumbersome than simple numbering, but an educated Roman would have been expected to be familiar with the lists of consuls and thus be able to know which year was meant when a date was given as “on the third day before the kalends of June when X and Y were consuls”. We have largely (not fully) complete lists of consuls, so modern historians don’t have problems translating such dates into our calendar.
Is bar mitzvah at age 12 a recent tradition? How far back does it go? how about traditions like the aborigine “walkabout” or similar early adult initiation rituals?
Remember, the ancients had very little to entertain them, and important reasons to watch the sky at night - it being the most accurate calendar. When we say “the ancients were not stupid” remember they also had not much else to distract them. That they could associate certain star patterns with certain important times - end of most frosts, time to harvest, etc. - was the start to calendars. They could count and use the phases of the moon as a rough guide to determine timing - the equivalent of “Aquarius is rising and it’s a full moon, so just after the next full moon in 30 days we’ll be out of Aquarius.”
There are clerics from way back when who could recite the entire Quran or Bible or whatever their holy book was, from memory. Wandering bards could recite the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey from memory. Some of us remember a time when we didn’t have a gizmo to carry around that would beep at us to remind us of important things to do like doctor’s appointments - you had to read the notes on the kitchen calendar and remember them all day. Our memories are deteriorating as fast as technology takes over, and it’s no different when the first cultures began writing things down.
Even for less developed cultures, being able to look at the winter stars and figure “I need to make this food last 2 more moons” was kind of important.
So I’m going to make a wild uneducated guess that humans for many millennia had a good idea what time of year it was to within a few days; if pressed, some tribal elder could probably give the average person a rough idea within a few days what day of the year (based on stars) they were born, and what significant events happened about that time.
The question is - how important was that? Whether you were old enough to watch the goats on your own or join the hunting party did not depend on whether you had magically crossed that 12-year mark last month or this month. it more depended on what your elders though and how desperate they were for manpower.
I presume traditional “coming of age ceremonies” and the ability to marry depended on outward signs of puberty and elders’ judgement of one’s ability to fulfill the adult tasks necessary to raise a family.
I’m the same way, but this doesn’t yield any means of saying “today is my birthday”. Unless my birthday happens to coincide with some very specific and reliable one-day event, like I can see Betelgeuse through the big oak split when I’m sitting on my back porch after dinner.
I’m sure that if ancient people counted these things at all (which I’m sure some of them did… look at Stonehenge for example), it would be the number of springs or summers or what have you. Lots of literary examples of that.
I recently listened to a Great Courses about ancient Mesopotamia and the lecturer spent some time talking about this. And it’s not just that they weren’t stupid, they also weren’t unsophisticated. They were exactly as capable of complex, sophisticated thought as we are; even if their world was primitive and superstitious.
The cultures of early modern man, even bound to oral traditions, were incredibly ancient. They’d been watching the sky and noting the regular cycles of things for tens of thousands of years.
And if somebody cared to remember that they were born four days after the first full moon after the deer begin their fall migration? That’s a birthday even if it’s not going to fall on the same solar day every year. They were easily capable of noting birthdays even if they likely didn’t bother with it.
Relatively recent, especially considering the time scales we’re talking about here. I think it was established in early medieval times, but I could be wrong.
I thought the bar mitzvah was at thirteen? And in centuries past, was it at that age, or was it held once puberty (facial hair, etc) started, which is about the same time?
Bar mitzvah - the ceremony for boys - occurs at age 13 or later. It’s the bat mitzvah - the ceremony for girls - that occurs at age 12 in some Jewish groups, at 13 for others.
The Bible/Torah does not specifically mention 13 - that apparently was codified in the middle ages in the Mishnah, during the early part of the Rabbinic period of Judaism (which we’re still in).
I should note that while the bar mitzvah has a lot of similarities between Jewish groups the bat mitzvah varies considerably, with some groups replacing it with a somewhat different coming-of-age marker.
I’ll also note that the Jewish calendar is a lunisolar mash-up with “leap months” occurring every few years to keep things lined up with the actual seasons. So some years have 13 months instead of 12. That happens seven times in every 19 year cycle. I’m not sure exactly how far back it goes but it apparently predates the anno domini system. The Jewish year is very, very closely tied to reading from the Torah, such that the reading finishes the end of the Torah the last day of the year and starts anew on the first day of the year with “…In the beginning” Genesis 1:1. This results in an accurate year-count and reasonable determination of birth date.
Can I also note that Jews keep track of death-dates as well as birthdates? The term is yahrzeit for the anniversary of a person’s death.
Another point, since we see a number of ancient constructs like Stonehenge designed to pinpoint a particular day, the enumeration of days in some form of calendar was not only known but important to many early societies. Presumably they could count well enough to see it was the same number of days (give or take a leap day) to realize just how cyclical, coordinated, and precise the year, the moon, the stars were.
I would suggest though, that unless the person and event was remarkable, noting the specific “date” for personal events was probably a later conceit - i.e. would it be a leap from “Grog the chief died on the solstice!” to “Chief Grog III was born 16 days before the equinox 36 years ago” to “gee, dad, when was I born?” As more events became notably tied to the cycle of years, it evolved to greater precision for naming the specific times of hte year. A more intersting debate might be - when did we first think of months as divisions of the year, not phases of the moon? When did we evolve the week of 7 days? When did the first lunar calendars emerge, which obviously are sometimes only loosely tied to solar years? I’m going to guess that birthdays were not important to remember until there was a more systematic denomination of days of the year than “a moon and 8 days after the spring equinox”.