For the first time in recent decades, a large-scale study of the Hisobi Mard or time counting by human body, which is a unique solar calendar known only in this region and lacking analogues in other cultures, has been conducted in the vast territory of Pamir and Darvaz. As a result of the research, extensive body of materials has been collected allowing comparison of the knowledge of modern informants with the data collected by Soviet ethnographers 70–90 years ago. It has been found that the knowledge about time counting by human body has not changed in recent decades. Thus, despite the natural changes in society caused by political, social and economic processes, modern informants know the account of Hisobi Mard no less than those who lived in the 1930s–1950s. This was a somewhat unexpected result, since with the availability of an accurate modern calendar and the informatization of society, the traditional folk calendar has long become irrelevant in everyday life, but nevertheless, it is being passed on from generation to generation. Based on modern data, it can be argued that the Hisobi Mard calendar had territorial variability, when the options for implementing the account could differ in neighboring regions yet remaining uniform within same region. A hypothesis about the evolution of the Hisobi Mard calendar has been proposed, according to which it underwent simplification in the process of cultural exchange and migration of the population.

Keywords: Tajikistan, Pamir, Solar calendars, counting by human body parts.

 

Funding. The work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation project 22-18-00529 “Relicts of astronomical traditions in the culture of the ancient farmers of Central Asia according to ethnographic data”.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Accepted: 03.10.2024

Article is published: 15.03.2025