Why do we have leap years?-part 2
According to Romans, even numbers are considered to be a piece of bad luck. So to avoid them, he started removing a day from all the even-numbered months, and now the total number of days of these 10 months counted up to 298. (name of months)
But Numa wasn't satisfied as his intention was to cover the 12 cycles or phases of the moon which takes 29.5 days in a month. So they decided to multiply 29.5 days with 12 cycles of the moon and came up with a year formed of 354 days and as it was an even number again.
Numa take advantage of being a king and willingly added another day in the year to make it a count of 355 days and an odd number, really odd I say but the problem was even bigger now as they were left with an extra 57 days in hand.
So to cover them up King Numa added two more months at the end of the calendar and stacked 29 days to January and 28 to another which was February the shortest month of the year. But what about the extra one day in February that makes a leap year?
Well as time progressed and later emperor Julius Caesar came into power, he bought the Solar Calendar into the picture which had a year made of 365 days, the Solar calendar moved January and February in the beginning and made arrangements by adding 10 days in different months to achieve a total of 365 days.
But in the end, they were left with the doubt that what to do with that one extra day that came by adding an extra six four times? Well as February was the shortest month, they decided to add this one extra day to it and that's how February 29 days in a leap year.
However, everything is meant to be temporary. So even the Julian calendar began to fail after 1500 years, as the seasons were 10 days late, and thus to overcome this, Pope Gregory XIII replaced the Julian Calendar with the more refined Gregorian one which we still follow, and assume that it will show us the seasons and festival cycle correctly for the next 8000 years.
FUN FACTS
Did you know? About 4 million people in the world are leaping day babies, termed as leapers or leaplings? Also, another fun fact for you, if January 1st and December 31st fall on different days of the week then understand that it is a Leap Year.
To know about the invention of paper click👉 Paper
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