Coligny Calendar
Time can be reconciled between the moon's visible cycle and the solar year through a fixed, precisely tracked lunisolar calendar with named months marked good or bad for undertakings, requiring calculation, not just observation, to keep the two cycles in step.
- a five-year lunisolar cycle with calculated intercalation
- days marked favorable or unfavorable for undertakings
- Gaulish language written in the Latin alphabet on bronze
- evidence for a Gaulish calendrical tradition surviving under Roman rule
A bronze tablet, broken into more than 150 fragments, found near Coligny in eastern France and inscribed in Gaulish using Latin letters and numerals. It lays out a five-year lunisolar calendar of sixty-two consecutive months (with two intercalary months added to keep pace with the solar year), each month marked as a sequence of days and annotated with recurring notices, including the terms MAT and ANM, generally read as good and not-good, marking days as favorable or unfavorable for certain activities. Though the surviving bronze was cast under Roman rule, paleographic and calendrical analysis places its underlying system, and likely the artifact itself, in the 2nd century AD, and its structure is generally taken as reflecting a pre-Roman Gaulish calendrical tradition maintained by druidic specialists rather than a Roman invention.
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