Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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The principal error lies in the systematising, the seasons being regarded as periods of a definite number of days. This is not the case even to-day, and still less was it so, as we have seen, among primitive peoples. Still more clearly does the same error of method appear in Tille’s assumption of a sexpartite division of the year, or of sixty-day periods, as they are expressly termed. He refers to the six old Indian seasons, which are a comparatively late and artificial product called forth by the adoption of the names of the seasons in the reckoning by months[334], and to the pairs of months of the Syrian and Arabian calendar. He regards as 60-day divisions not only the smaller seasons mentioned ssss1, the duration of which was originally no less indefinite than it is to-day, but also the Germanic pairs of months, which owe their origin to an adaptation of the Roman months (for this see ssss1). The 60-day periods are so far from being primitive that they first took their origin under the influence of the reckoning in months.