Happy new millennium

What do you mean, the millennium was almost seven years ago? Not in Ethiopia, it wasn’t. How come?
Well, in around AD525, the Roman church amended its calendar, placing the birth of Jesus eight years earlier than had previously been accepted and the Gregorian calendar, as it eventually became known, is the basis for the western calendar of today.
Ethiopia, however, ignored the adjustment and stuck with the ancient Egyptian calendar consisting of 13 months (12 months of 30 days and the 13th month of five days). Each new year falls on September 11, in western terms, except in a leap year, as is the case this year.
So today 75 million Ethiopeans celebrate the new millennium. Enjoy.
More information here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 7:49 am and is filed under World current affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Comment

  • funkypancake
    September 12th, 2007 at 6:32 pm

    i was thinking about this earlier. if we’d been quicker off the mark on this we could have stockpiled a load of our own year 2000 celebratory tack (hats, party blowers, banners etc) – available after the event for knock down prices.
    we could then have sold them on to other countries using a different calendar.
    although i suspect they would have better taste and declined our fantastic plastic tatt !
    so perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
    in fact, forget i ever mentioned it.
    happy 2000th ethiopea.