Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Time is on my mind
It is 1:15, Tuesday morning, 26-Meskrem-2002. Everything is different in Ethiopia, especially time... Local Ethiopian time starts when the sun rises, making for some interesting differences as the sun rises across the country with a difference of 45 minutes. The calendar, the Ge'ez calendar, has 12 months of 30 days each, with one short month of five or six days depending on leap year. New Year falls sometime in September (about three weeks ago). Their year started counting seven years after the conventional western calendar as it took a cleric that long to reach this part of Africa to spread the news of Christ's death. So they started when he got here.
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sounds a bit apocryphal. Would they have been waiting to hear of the news of his death when they didn't know about the birth? Good story, though.
ReplyDeleteI did a bit of research about the Ethiopian calendar on Wikipedia. They offered several other plausible explanations relying on astronomers and mathematicians. It turns out that truth, as with time and many other things in Africa, is relative.
ReplyDeleteI think the relativity is true in the rest of the world too.
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