The Hadradan Calendar
A Brief History

The calendar used in the Empire is known as the Anurean Calendar after the scholar, astronomer and philosopher, Palatine Anureas. Anureas lived from 900 to 882 PL (Urovan time), and set about improving the existing Patrician Calendar so it was actually accurate.

The Patrician Calendar had been in existence for at least two centuries and was itself a combination of Vikallian belief and Hadradan superstition. In addition to the fact that it was off by a week and a half, it was politically expedient to produce a new calendar. This was the time when the Hadradans were just setting off to conquer the world, and using someone else's calendar was a definite no-no.

Where the Patrician Calendar based itself on a rather woolly delineation of the seasons, Anureas looked to the Sun for guidance. Over three years of study, Anureas chronicled The Cycles of the Sun based on the rising and the setting of the sun as seen from the top of the highest tower in Hadras. From that information, Anureas extrapolated a pattern for the passage of the sun in the sky, and was able to see for the first time where one year ended and another began. Anureas identified the days of high and low sun and was able to set a firm date for the solstices and the equinoxes. Before, they had always been moveable feasts and celebrated at different times in different parts of the country. Anureas then knew there were 1372 days in a year. The trick was finding a way to break that up into more manageable chunks.

This is where religion enters the picture. At this stage in its history, the Empire did not have a marked written tradition. Very few scrolls had been penned, and certainly no books had appeared. Therefore, the few treatises that did exist on matters of religion and spirituality held considerable weight. The weightiest of these was a something called The Velvet Canto. This work laid out the nature of the worship of God and the principle of the Moiety. The Moiety stated that every man and woman had to give one seventh of all they owned to the church. Over the years this was taken to mean one seventh of everything, including one seventh of their time. All Hadradans were expected to attend church one day in seven, for the whole day. Anureas used this principle to set the fine detail of his calendar.

If the people of Hadrada had to visit church once every seven days, then seven days should be the first division for the Anurean calendar. Anureas called this division a week. There would be 196 weeks in a year, and on one day of each week everyone would go to church for worship. 196 divisions in a year still seemed a bit much, so Anurean turned away from religion to the growing science of mathematics for his answer. Using the number seven as a base he divided the year into twenty-eight months (seven per season), each month made up of seven weeks. The very fact that everything worked out exactly with no awkward remainders and need for leap years obviously pointed to God's divine plan in Anureas's eyes.

The Impact of the Aurean Calendar

Anureas never lived to see his calendar implemented. This was probably a blessing as the strife it caused would have sent him spinning in his grave. Who was this astronomer who declared which day every one of the faithful should worship? If everyone worshipped on the same day did that not mean that the entire empire ground to a halt once every week? That was hardly practical, surely.

But practicality eventually went out of the window with the adoption of the calendar as Anureas had intended in 880 PL. It heralded an incredible social and religious revolution in Hadrada. The fact that everything fitted to Anureas's pattern of seven days in a week, seven weeks in a month and twenty-eight months in a year pointed to the fact that God was working through Anureas to give His people a decent way of telling when it was. There were those who dissented, and even in 204 LE there are sects who insist on celebrating the holy day on a different day of the week.

The Naming of the Days and Months

When he finished the calendar Anureas devised names for the days of the week and months of the year. These names have undergone dozens of revisions over the years. The months of the year have always been named after emperors and other great men and women of Hadradan history; the days of the week after prophets of the One God (except the holy day, that was named Sun'cin – Day of the Sun). However, there are far more than six prophets and twenty-eight emperors in Hadradan history, and so over the years everyone who was anyone has wanted a crack at immortality by having a month or a day of the week named after him. This caused significant confusion for many years. However, since the sacking of the Empire by the Mannenites in 16 PL the names have not changed. Therefore, the Hadradans have had 220 years of continuity in their calendar.

The Year

The final puzzle was where to start counting the year from. It was 880 PL when the calendar was adopted at the imperial court, but the emperor and the Church wanted to give the calendar a more religious significance. At a time before the Great Schism there was only one date important enough to be used: the day that the prophet Elyas first led the Hadradans from oppression in the northern lands to the paradise of the south. The Urovan equivalent of this date is 1121 PL and it is from here that all years were calculated. That means that 204 LE in the Urovan calendar equates to the year 1325 in the Hadradan calendar.

The Urovan and Anurean Calendars

The Urovan calendar is entirely based upon the work of Palatine Anureas, although few (if any) Urovans actually know that. The names of the days of the week have been changed to reflect the Moon Gods, and the months of the year named from nature, but otherwise it is the same calendar. The only major difference is that in Urova a greater emphasis is placed on the passing of the seasons. Where a Urovan would name something's age in seasons, Hadradans would use years or months. A child of five seasons in Uris would be named in Hadras as one and a half years, or a year and fourteen (one year and fourteen months).

See Also

• The Hadradan Calendar
• The Urovan Calendar