This set of essays, drawn from a conference held at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, has a coherence all too often absent from such collections. The essays draw on a variety of evidence including dated documents, iconography, and contemporary discussions of calendric procedures to portray the techniques employed to regulate lunar calendars - usually but not always luni-solar calendars - and how those techniques influenced and reflected the societies that developed them. The contributions focus on the Jewish calendar, on related calendars in the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, and on Christian efforts to reconcile the date of Easter, reckoned on Jewish luni-solar calendric principles, with the various calendric systems employed by Christian communities ranging from Ireland to western China. Further approaches to lunar time reckoning are found in discussions of the ways the peoples of the Americas marked the passage of time by the phases of the Moon and of the significantly different luni-solar calendric systems employed in China and Japan.
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