- published: 11 Oct 2009
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The Berber calendar is the agricultural calendar that is traditionally used in North Africa regions. It is also known in Arabic as the ﻓﻼﺣﻲ fellāḥī "rustic" or ﻋﺠﻤﻲ ʿajamī "foreign" calendar. It is employed to regulate the seasonal agricultural works, in place of the Islamic calendar which, being of lunar type, without any relation with the seasonal cycles, is useful to calculate religious festivals but ill-adapted for agriculture.
The Berber calendar, a legacy of Roman Mauretania, is a surviving form of the ancient Julian calendar (with month names derived from the Latin) which was used in Europe before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and which is also still in use in the Eastern churches.
There have been other indigenous calendars among the Berber peoples in the past, for example that of the Guanches of the Canary Islands, but relatively little is known of these.
Not much is known about the division of time among ancient Berbers. Some elements of a pre-Islamic, and almost certainly pre-Roman, calendar emerge from some medieval writings, analyzed by Nico van den Boogert. Some correspondences with the traditional Tuareg calendar suggest that in antiquity there existed, with some degree of diffusion, a "Berber" time computation, organized on native bases.