The Rhythm of Time We Inherited Without Noticing
Schwarz Coulange Méroné
August 2026
For most people, January 1 is one of the dates on the calendar that has a very special flavor. To begin with, it’s a holiday in much of the world. Music, traditional foods, fireworks, and good wishes usually punctuate it. Families, friends, and people from some religious traditions gather to celebrate the start of a new cycle. For some, it is an emotional occasion; for others, a frankly sad one: “This is my first New Year without Mom (or any other loved one).” And yes, January 1 is New Year’s Day—the day the year begins in most countries. But why does the year begin on January 1 and not, say, on April 1 or August 1?
Well, the fact of the matter is that January 1 has nothing intrinsically “New-Year-ish” about it. Science doesn’t point to any particular astronomical position, consistent planetary alignment, seasonal transition, or other cosmic event associated with that day. The weather changes too, of course, but not in any consistent way: depending on where you are on the planet, January 1 can be sunny, snowy, cold, hot, or temperate (or even all of these on the same day)—and it can be different from one year to the next. Given that, the year could begin on any date, not necessarily even on the first day of a month. Why not on your country’s most patriotic day? Or on the birthday of its most prominent founder?
But why do we need years at all? Why not simply keep counting days indefinitely? After all, the day is perhaps the most obvious unit of time available to human beings: there is daylight, then darkness, then daylight again, and over and over again (things work somewhat differently in the polar regions, though!). We don’t need a calendar to experience that cycle. A year is different. It is a way of gathering a much larger cycle into a unit that humans can name, count, and organize. The Earth and the Sun don´t announce: “Today, a new year has begun!” Nature does give us cycles: humans give those cycles names, numbers, boundaries, and meaning.
Although the concept of year is a human construction, it is a remarkably useful one. Unlike a random span of days, a year corresponds roughly to the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun, bringing with it a recurring sequence of seasons and other natural cycles. For thousands of years, knowing where we are within that cycle has mattered enormously: it helped us anticipate changes in weather, plan agricultural activities, mark religious celebrations, organize political and economic life, and simply keep track of the passage of time on a scale larger than a day. The cycle itself is given to us by nature. What humans have constructed is the way we divide it, name it, and decide when one year ends and another begins.
And humans have not always agreed on where that boundary should fall. Different societies have marked the beginning and end of the year at different points in the natural cycle, depending on what mattered most to them—seasons, agriculture, religious observances, political traditions, or other considerations. In ancient Egypt, the calendar was closely connected to the annual flooding of the Nile; in Mesopotamia, the year began with Nisanu, around the spring equinox; and in ancient China, the traditional New Year followed a lunisolar calendar and therefore fell on a different date from year to year. There was nothing inevitable about choosing one particular day as the beginning of the year.
Rome had its own tradition. March 1 was traditionally the beginning of the Roman year for centuries. By the second century BCE, the consuls—Rome’s highest-ranking officials—began their annual terms on March 15. In 153 BCE, the beginning of the consular year was moved to January 1, largely for practical reasons connected to Rome’s military operations in Hispania (roughly present-day Spain). January 1 thus became the beginning of the Roman political year. In a very loose modern analogy, it was somewhat like moving the beginning of the year to coincide with the inauguration of a country’s new political leadership.
January, however, was not an entirely political choice. The month was already named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and passages, often depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions—one toward what had been and the other toward what was to come. The symbolism seems almost perfect for the beginning of a new year. But there is a catch: Janus was associated with beginnings and transitions in general; his association with January was not originally equivalent to a special astronomical role for the beginning of the year. The date had acquired a new significance mainly because Rome needed its political calendar to work differently.
The older Roman calendar, however, left fingerprints behind. Look at the names of the months from September to December: September comes from the Latin word septem, seven; October from octo, eight; November from novem, nine; and December from decem, ten—respectively, the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months of the year. Yet today they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months. The names make sense only if we remember that March once stood at the beginning of the Roman calendar, pushing these four months two positions forward. The Roman calendar changed, but its old numbering remained embedded in the languages that emerged from or were influenced by Latin.
But a political decision made in Rome did not automatically become a global convention. Its survival depended on something more powerful than the original decision: institutional continuity. Once January 1 became attached to the Roman political year, it became embedded in administration, law, religious observances, and the everyday organization of public life. When Julius Caesar later reformed the Roman calendar in 46 BCE, he corrected its accumulated discrepancies without changing the beginning of the year. The calendar changed, but January 1 remained. And when the Roman Empire eventually disappeared, January 1 did not disappear with it.
The calendar would undergo several reforms over the centuries. Some corrected its increasingly noticeable discrepancies with the astronomical year; others changed how dates were calculated or observed. But through these changes, one thing remained remarkably stable: January 1 continued to mark the beginning of the year. The calendar changed again and again, but the boundary stayed.
This is what I call historical infrastructure: the structures, conventions, and practices that societies build at particular moments in history and that continue to shape life long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared. Their survival can be surprisingly quiet. They don’t need to be consciously defended or even remembered; they simply become part of the systems we inherit and use. They feel natural; some are even treated as sacred. January 1 offers us a particularly clear example. But how did this Roman convention survive the Roman world itself and eventually become a global one?
Beyond Rome, January 1 survived through the societies that inherited and adapted Roman institutions and the Roman calendar, particularly in Europe. The convention did not remain untouched: calendars were reformed, religious traditions influenced how the year was observed, and different European societies sometimes used different dates to mark the beginning of the year. Yet January 1 eventually prevailed across much of Europe. By the early modern period, January 1 had become firmly established across much of Europe, and European expansion carried its calendar far beyond the continent.
The dates tell their own story. The Italian states were already using January 1 in many places by the sixteenth century. Spain and Portugal standardized it in 1556, France in 1564, Scotland in 1600, Russia in 1700, and England and its colonies in 1752.
Beyond Europe, the story took different paths. In many places, it was less about a new country formally adopting January 1 than about inheriting a calendar already embedded in the institutions of the colonial societies from which their modern states emerged. In Mesoamerica and in territories incorporated into the Inca Empire, for example, European calendrical practices were introduced and institutionalized during the colonial period alongside Spanish political, religious, and administrative institutions, displacing or subordinating existing indigenous ways of organizing time. When modern states later emerged from these colonial societies, they did not have to decide anew whether the year should begin on January 1; they simply inherited the convention.
Other societies faced a different choice. Countries with their own established calendrical and political traditions had to decide whether to maintain their existing conventions or align themselves with the increasingly international system. Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, China in 1912, Greece in 1923, and Turkey in 1926. The Gregorian calendar was, after all, a reform of the Roman calendar, preserving its January 1 beginning while correcting how the calendar tracked the solar year. In each case, adopting the Gregorian calendar therefore also meant establishing January 1 as the beginning of the civil year, even though traditional, cultural, and religious calendars and ways of marking the beginning of a new year continued to coexist alongside it.
As those adoption dates suggest, the world was becoming increasingly interconnected, and having different systems for measuring and organizing time became increasingly inconvenient. The gradual establishment of standardized time zones is another clear example of this. Trade, diplomacy, transportation, finance, science, administration, and communication all benefited from shared conventions. Thus, January 1 no longer needed to be defended as Roman, European, or even Western. It had become useful precisely because so many people were already using it.
And so, when January 1 comes, we celebrate it, make resolutions, call our families, watch fireworks, mourn those who are no longer with us, and welcome what we call a new year. None of this requires us to think about Roman consuls, ancient calendars, Janus, or the political decisions that helped establish the date. That is precisely how historical infrastructure works: it becomes so familiar that the history beneath it disappears. The rhythm of time we inherited does not usually announce itself as an inheritance. Sometimes it simply arrives every January 1.
So, next January 1, don’t forget to wish your loved ones a Happy New Year. But remember: we humans created it.
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