The poet Omar Khayyam helped design a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian.
The Jalali calendar of 1079 drifts a day in about 5,000 years; the Gregorian (1582) every 3,330.
More amazing facts
- 1066 · 1910 The same Halley's Comet embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry in 1066 returned in 1910 — when the Earth even passed through its tail.
- 1068 · 1957 The medieval Ghana Empire was not in Ghana at all but in today's Mauritania and Mali.
- 1086 · 1179 Domesday Book, the 1086 survey of England, got its name because it could not be challenged.
- 1088 · 1187 A Chinese scholar described the magnetic compass a century before Europe — and noticed at once that it doesn't point quite north.
- 1088 The most elaborate clock of the 11th century stood in China.
- 1090 'Assassin' comes from a nickname for a medieval order based in the Alamut mountain fortress in Iran, founded in 1090.