SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Humans have been making New Year’s resolutions for approximately 4,000 years. But where and how did this tradition begin?
Babylonian New Year
The first people who recorded their celebrations that honored the new year were the ancient Babylonians, who held a 12-day religious festival in Nisannu (mid-March) around the vernal equinox when barley was planted. The Jews still call the month Nisan.
The enormous Babylonian festival was called Akitu was a time for crowning kings or renewing pledges to the current king.
The Babylonian New Year was also when people promised the gods they would pay their debts and return all objects they’d borrowed from others during the year.
Here’s how the Babylonian calendar worked.
But the Babyloanians weren’t the only ancient society that celebrated the New Year. Ancient Romans had New Year’s celebrations, too.
Ancient Roman New Year
Numa Pompilius (a Roman king who reigned from 715 B.C.E. until 673 B.C.E.) revised the calendar of the Roman republic and make January the first month of the year.
Julius Caesar updated the calendar in the year 46 b.c. and kept Jan. 1 as the day the new year began. A Roman god with two faces, who was said to guard gates and doors, supposedly had the ability to look backwards into the year before and into the future at the same time. Romans promised Janus they would be good the next year each “January.”
Here’s how the Julian calendar worked in ancient Rome.
Gregorian calendar and the New Year
Christians in the early church used New Year’s to think about their past mistakes and pledge to do better in the future. By the 1700s, some Christians were renewing their covenants.
Since October 1582, most of the modern world has transitioned into using the Gregorian calendar, which is basically a reformed Julian calendar.
Here’s how the Gregorian calendar works.
In the Gregorian calendar, January is named after Janus. February is named after a purification festival in ancient Rome that was called februa. March was named after the Roman god of war, Mars. April’s name is controversial and it could come from several sources, but it might be named after the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and procreation: Aphrodite. May is named after the Greek goddess of growth, Maia. Juno was considered to be the queen of the gods, and that’s where we get the name June. July is after Julius Caesar, because it’s his calendar. Augustus Caesar, the nephew of Julius Caesar, who was the first emperor of Rome, is where we get the name for August. September, October, November, and December are all Latin names for the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth. Those numbers make much more sense when you consider that New Year’s day in ancient Rome was once in March instead of in January.
And just in case you wondered, the word “month” means moon, because it takes a month for the moon to go through all of its phases.
In the ancient world, there were moon calendars, solar calendars, and solar-lunar calendars, but that’s another story.
Today we make resolutions on New Year’s that are, more often than not, related to lifestyle improvements.
It’s estimated that around 9% of those who make a New Year’s resolution will actually keep it.
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