Human calendar
The human calendar is a proposal for a calendar that would replace the one we currently use. The Gregorian calendar is a real mess: We go straight from year -1 to year 1, from 4 to 15 October 1582, months of 30 and 31 days follow each other randomly without any logic, from one year to the next the dates never correspond to the same day of the week, September is the 9th month, etc.
The human calendar is a lunisolar calendar that begins at 10,001 BC (Holocene era). The start of this era coincides roughly with the beginning of Man’s sedentarisation, and therefore with the beginning of the first civilisations. Starting the calendar at the beginning of the Holocene era makes it easier to include a year 0 and to date things that happened before Jesus Christ (whose date of birth is btw imagined), while giving it a relatively neutral character. In concrete terms, the year 2012 in the Gregorian calendar would correspond to the year 12012 in the human calendar and Jericho, one of the world’s first cities, would have been populated around 1500 HE (-8500 BC).
The year begins on the equivalent of March 21 (around the spring equinox in temperate climates of the northern hemisphere), and each season always corresponds to a quarter (from the first day of the first month to the last day of the third month).
The months have been reordered and renamed to make them more logical:
1. Primile
2. Secundile
3. Tertile
4. Quartile
5. Quintile
6. Sextile
7. September
8. October
9. November
10. December
11. Undecember
12. Duodecember
Starting the year in spring puts September, October, November and December in the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th positions.
The 5th and 6th months were called “Quintilis” and “Sextilis” by the Romans before they were renamed after the emperors Julius and Augustus, so the same logic was used to name the rest of the months.
This calendar has 12 months of 30 days each. To arrive at a 365-day year, we add 1 extra day after the months of Secundile, Tertile, Quartile, Quintile and Sextile. I chose this arrangement because the seasons do not have durations strictly equal to 91 days (a quarter of a year), since the Earth’s trajectory is not strictly circular (in the northern hemisphere, spring lasts an average of 92.8 days, summer 93.6, autumn 89.8 and winter 89 days).
Compared with a year of 13 months of 28 days, which is closer to 365 days, a year of 12 months of 30 days has the advantage that it can be subdivided into periods (seasons, semesters, quarters, etc.), and the months remain close to the length of a lunation (i.e. around 29.5 days, taking into account the Earth’s orbit). A month of 30 days can also be divided into a precise period of 5 weeks of 6 days.
The days of the week have also been renamed, as in the Republican calendar, except that they are hexads (6-day weeks) rather than decades (10-day weeks):
1. Primidi/Primiday? (Monday)
2. Duodi/Duoday? (Tuesday)
3. Tertidi/Tertiday? (Wednesday)
4. Quartidi/Quartiday? (Thursday)
5. Quintidi/Quintiday? (Friday)
6. Sextidi/Sextiday? (Saturday)
Keeping a precise number of 5 hexads in each month means that the same date can always correspond to the same day of the week (the first day of each month will always be a Primidi, for example). A 6-day week including a 2-day weekend is also an excellent opportunity to introduce a collective reduction in working hours (with compensatory recruitment and no loss of pay).
Every 4 years, a leap year adds an extra 1 day after the first month of the year (Primile), with a single exception every 128 years or so, so as to maintain an average of 365.2422 days (the time it takes the Earth to go around the sun).