Well as promised here is the continuation of the history of calendars:

"The Chinese Calendar

The Chinese calendar is less a way of keeping time than a method of assigning personal attributes based on the date of their birth. The Chinese calendar is a zodiac calendar. The giant celebration that takes place at the start of the year, usually around February, makes this calendar worth mentioning. The Chinese calendar is one that makes more than a billion people stop and take a new year holiday is too big to ignore.

Although the Western astrological calendar matches twelve signs to the constellations that are in the sky at the time of someone’s birth, the Chinese calendar cycles twelve animals through the years. An old story explains the order of the animals.

How the Chinese Calendar Got its Order
The Jade Emperor declared that the first animal to cross a river would be the first in the calendar. The second animal would be placed second, and so on. The cat and the rat asked the ox for a lift. When the ox reached the bank, the rat pushed the cat into the river. The rat then jumped off the ox and came first. The tiger arrived after the ox, followed by the rabbit which had jumped from rock to rock. The rabbit then leaped onto a log that was blown to the shore.

The dragon came fifth. This dragon had stopped to bring rain to a village, then he blew the rabbit’s log to the shore. The horse arrived, with the snake clinging to its hoof. The snake took sixth place, the horse seventh. The rooster had found a raft, which she rode with the monkey and the goat. The goat was eighth, the monkey ninth, and the rooster tenth.

What Happened to the Cat?
The dog had stopped to play in the water, so he only came eleventh, but he still beat the pig which had stopped for a meal then had fallen asleep. But even the pig did better than the cat. The cat had drowned when the rat pushed her into the river.

It’s a beautiful story (except for the cat), and the Chinese calendar plays a role in modern Chinese life. This calendar marks the country’s biggest holiday, and people will know under which animal they were born. What they might not know, though, is that each sign also matches a month of the year and a season of the year — like the Western astrological signs.

The tiger, for example, corresponds with Aquarius and Pisces and runs from early February to early March. The Dragon crosses Aries and Taurus and runs from early April to early May. Even the days of the week align with zodiac animals: Monday with the goat; Tuesday with the dragon and pig; Wednesday with the horse and rooster, and so on. It’s mostly the Chinese calendar that tells you when to light the fireworks and which kind of decorations to put up in February.

Mesoamerican Calendars
So far, we’ve focused on calendars that were created in Europe and Asia, but Mesoamerica also formed indigenous calendrical systems. Some of these calendars are still in use today. Many of these calendars are not widespread, but some groups in the highlands of Guatemala and some regions of Mexico continue to use these ancient calendars.

That’s a problem because the calendar in most common use across different Mesoamerican cultures is a ritual calendar. This calendar lasts 260 days and has no relationship with any farming cycles or astronomical movements.

The origin of the calendar isn’t clear. Izapa, the site of a 3,200-year-old settlement in Mexico, experiences 260 days between the sun’s two zeniths each year. The site may be one source of the calendar, but it could also be the result of the Maya civilization playing with the numbers thirteen and twenty; which they liked. Another theory associates the calendar with the length of a human pregnancy, but the origin of this practice still isn’t entirely clear.

The Mayans called the calendar “tzolk’in.” They named twenty days which they associated with thirteen numbers. There was no day or month, but each day had a name and a number, and the calendar took 260 days to work through the complete cycle. Each day also aligned with a natural phenomenon, such as a crocodile or death. Glyphs (like a hieroglyph or symbol, or picture) on stone carvings, represent days.

The Aztecs used a similar calendar called “tonalpohualli,” which means “count of days,” in Nahuatl.

The Aztec calendar, too, combined a 20-day cycle called “veinenas” with a 13-day period called, “trecenas.” The days had glyphs associated with Aztec deities such as Quetzalcoatl and Mayahuel.

The tonalpohualli contained only 260 days. But the Aztecs had a second calendar that came a little closer to the solar calendar. The “xiuhpōhualli” consisted of eighteen months each lasting 20 days, with a five-day period tacked onto the end. That brought the year to 365 days. Xiuhpōhualli would align with tonalpohualli every 52 years.

Modern Calendars
We’ve seen that there’s been no shortage of calendars over the last few millennia. Calendars have always been important in civilizations wherever they have existed in the world. We want to know what time it is, and where we fit in the universe of time and space. We can see that the Gregorian calendar has become widespread. It’s international and provides a way for anyone anywhere to synchronize times with anyone located anywhere else on the planet. Even though several other calendars have remained in use (about 40 differing calendars), these calendars mostly mark the times of religious events rather than secular occasions.

The format in which all calendars have been presented have changed over time. Early man used the first calendars to mark the solstice and the passage of migrating animals in stone. The stone made their calendars hard to change or adapt to changing circumstances. Stone made their calendars hard to move around. If you wanted to know how close the year was to mid-summer or mid-winter, you needed to make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge or Warren Field. It wasn’t very convenient.

Gratefully, that brings us to today’s calendars and their ease of use. Although some designers have become very creative, using blocks to mark dates, days, and months, most calendars are either paper or digital.

Paper Calendars

The use of parchment, and eventually paper, made creating and using calendars a great deal more convenient. One of the earliest paper calendars is the Chronography of 354. A wealthy Roman Christian, called Valentinus, commissioned Furius Dionysius Folocalus to draw and write the calendar (as they knew it) in the fourth century.

The original didn’t survive, but scribes copied the calendar through to the ninth century, with further copies made in the seventeenth century.

The Chronography of 354 calendar is more of an almanac than a calendar; it lists events that take place during the year and includes Christmas. That holiday inclusion is a notable addition in a calendar produced merely as Rome was shifting from pagan beliefs to a growing Christianity. The calendar is also heavily decorated, with drawings of the emperors; of personifications of the cities of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Trier. Seven planets and their orbits dot the calendar, and the signs of the zodiac are included. Dates marked in the calendar, other than Christmas, also include the dates of Easter from 312 to 411 AD; and the commemoration dates of popes and Christian martyrs.

The Calendar of Carthage
The Calendar of Carthage was a beautiful piece of work. But it shows that in the paper calendar’s earliest forms, it still marked set events rather than any record personal habits. The same usage of the calendar continued through the centuries that followed. The Calendar of Carthage dates to the sixth century and includes the commemorations of all of the bishops of Carthage from Gratus (c.343-348 AD) to Eugenius (481-505 AD).

The Carthage calendar also contains a long list of feast days for various martyrs, bishops, and saints. The month of May alone has ten such days, while January has eleven. December has a feast for “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God” on December 25th. But, with so many saints to mark and commemorate, it’s no wonder that the church needed to create almanacs to keep track of them all.

The idea that people needed calendars — or planners — to keep track of their own personal events is relatively new. Many of the earliest calendars would have been almanacs with extra space or pages for people to make their own entries. Most of these relics are lost. Once someone has used an almanac, there’s little point in keeping it.

Washington’s Diary
One of the earliest surviving paper calendars though belonged to George Washington.

His almanac also functioned as a local guide. In addition to telling him the times of sunrises and sunsets each day, it also told him the names of local inns, the postage rates in various locations, and even made predictions about the weather. (It’s not clear how accurate those predictions were.)

Washington, though, would add his own blank pages to his almanac. Each day, he wrote down the names of his visitors, the places he rode, and the people who dined with him. In effect, the almanac had become a diary, a record of what he had done. Although the calendar hadn’t yet become a record or a reminder of future events, it had expanded from a list of religious events.

Aitken’s Calendar
Robert Aitken, a publisher in Philadelphia, published the first proper planner in the US in 1773. It looked more like an account book than a calendar. One page had space for memoranda associated with various weeks of the month. The other page left space for the week’s accounts. Customers would write down what they spent and earned each week so that they could keep track of their finances.

Aitken’s planner didn’t take off, but the ability to scroll through the days and weeks to come and schedule planned events had already started. Aitken’s planner provided a way to record past events. This planner acted as a reminder for regular annual events such as religious holidays, but it also offered space for people to write down the activities or events they would be attending in the future.

By 1850, the ability to plan ahead on paper had become widespread. An 1844 list of taxpayers included one Bostonian with $100,000 in taxable wealth. His job? Manufacturing blank books, like calendars.

The Soldier’s Calendar
Upper-class men with busy lives and lots of riding companions tended to buy those calendars. By the time of the Civil War though, everyone was carrying calendars and planners that they could use to record their activities and organize their lives. The Boston Globe has described Union soldiers carrying their Standard Diary or their American Diary into battle.

One change was in the purpose of the calendar. By the start of the twentieth century, the calendar had become an essential tool, a way to make good use of one’s time instead of wasting it or leaving time alone — to fill by itself.

So vital had the diary become, and so widespread in its use, that in 1900 department store owner John Wanamaker gave a diary out for free with his catalog. The calendar was surrounded by advertising so that people would fill in their appointments alongside pitches for desks and linen.

The Wanamaker diary also contained a list of events taking place around the world over the coming year and included inspiring quotes for each day. With the Wanamaker diary, the format of the modern paper diary was largely complete.

The remaining development was relatively small. Despite the rise of calendars supported by advertising and branding, stationery stores continued to sell paper calendars and planners. Businesses continued to give away small calendars, and calendars could be attached to magnets that customers could stick to their fridge doors.

The real threat to paper calendars didn’t come from freebies. Nor did it come from a backlash against Pirelli or Sports Illustrated calendars in the workplace. The paper calendar seems to be meeting its demise from the rise of digital calendars which have brought a whole new level of functionality to calendars.

Digital Calendars
Paper calendars have always had their limitations. First, they were single-use. When the year ended, you had to go back to the shop to buy a new one — though, the paper calendar can provide a valuation record. The space inside them is minimal. Although calendars come in different sizes, people need to choose a compromise between cramped writing in a mobile notebook or generous space in a calendar that is difficult to carry.

Most importantly, though, users can’t readily share a paper calendar. There is only a one-off, or one-ever copy available. A group of people trying to organize an event have to pull out their paper calendars, then flick through pages until they all find an empty space.

Digital calendars have solved all of these problems. A digital calendar is permanent, and users can automatically renew their subscriptions. The size of the screen is the only limit, and if the screen is too small, a line will explain how many more appointments have been added. Calendars have become effectively unlimited and non-limiting."

There is just a tad bit more that covers Apple and Google Calendar to Microsoft calendars. I will cover this on Monday. Have a great weekend!!

Reference: https://www.calendar.com/history-of-the-calendar/