Today:
What is this date?
It is an Indian calendar system called Vikram Samvat named after the emperor Vikramaditya of Ujjain. The same king featured in Baital Pachisi stories.
It is a sophisticated calendar consisting of 30 days or 2 phases of 15 days. For simplicity, let's assume 30 days.
- day 1 and 30 are always a New Moon day
- day 15 is always a Full Moon day
The below phases of moon is created by me and it is not precise. It is only for demonstration.
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Did you know that Moon inspired the decimals we use today?
The Hindu numerals we know today 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 have
origins in India and there is enough proof that they are inspired from the phases
of moon.
Indians thought of things in a cyclical way rather than a linear way. This is why you find it very hard to write big numbers in Roman numerals but even a huge number is easy to write in Hindu numerals.
The oldest record of origins of Hindu numerals is found in the Kannada book Siribhoovalaya, written in the 9th century AD. The speciality of the book is that it is written only using Kannada numerals!
The book is still not deciphered completely because it requires language expertise, and probably AI. It is 6 times bigger than Mahabharata.
The picture shows Kannada numerals and how they are derived from the moon.
We use two pieces of the moon to form all the numerals.
Eventually all the numbers seem to have come from this to the current form it is in right now.
So the zero is not really nothing but a new moon.
This literally means cutting in Kannada. It is used when the paddy harvest is ready to be cut down. This process of cutting is called Kuylu - which is written here as shown in the arrow.
The dashed line probably depicts to cut.
With two halves of the moon, the numbers are made. You will observe that there are only 2 halves, not more used for all the numbers.
Some numbers have retained their antiquity even today like the number 0, 3, 8
This is the earliest records of origin of numbers. It probably was used thousands of years before as well but we never knew how it all came up to be.