Excerpt from The Maori Division of Time
In his interesting work entitled Neolithic Dew-ponds and Cattleways A. J. Hubbard wrote as follows: "Early man naturally measured the year from the ripening of the crops of one year to the corresponding period in the succeeding year. Thanks to the investigations of Sir Norman Lockyer and Mr. Penrose, it has perhaps been established that this system of measuring time gave the early part of May as a starting-point for the year in ancient Egypt, as it had been in Chaldea in a still more remote period." Another authority, however, states that the Egyptian year commenced with the cosmic rising of Sirius, about the middle of July.
The following extract is from Folk Lore, vol. xxv, No. 3: "Ancient Celts and Teutons reckoned only two seasons in the year, and began it with the winter season in November, not with the summer season in May. This, obviously, is the practical husbandman's calendar, beginning the year with ploughing and ending it after harvest."
It was during the autumn or early winter that the Maori year commenced-that is, in May or June; the precise time differed. The Pleiades year of south-eastern Asia has, at some unknown period, been introduced into the Pacific, and so is met with in these far southern isles of New Zealand.
Here, however, we encounter an instance of those contradictory and disconcerting facts so frequently met with in the study of Polynesian institutions. It frequently occurs that a community has preserved two different versions of a myth, or two forms of a custom, art, or institution. Now, in some districts, as the east coast of the North Island, the Pleiades year was a permanent institution, but in others the heliacal rising of Puanga (Rigel in Orion) marked the commencement of the year. This was the case in the far North, in the South Island, and at the Chatham Isles. It is possible that the two systems were introduced by different bands of migrants, and possibly from different regions of the Pacific. It is a noteworthy fact that the Orion year was followed by tribes most closely connected with the original people of the land, and the Pleiades year by the later-coming Takitumu migrants. The natives of the Takitumu district of the east coast were noted by Cook and his companions as being of superior culture to those of the far North and those of the South Island.
We are told that the primitive Aryan folk reckoned the years as winters divided into moons and nights, not into months and days, and that they made no attempt to reconcile solar and lunar time. The ancestors of the Polynesians must have possessed a somewhat similar system of time-measurement when they entered the Pacific region in times long past away. Their mode of life in the far-scattered isles of Polynesia would not make for advancement, but still there was evidently some unexplained system of intercalation by means of which the lunar year was occasionally rectified.
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