time of birds’ nesting(?) is come…” The days then get longer and warmer, and the first barley harvest takes place.
However, although the Jews have kept the Babylonian names of months at the expense of the ancient Hebrew ones (some of which are mentioned in the Old Testament), their calendar has reverted to the natural Israelite year beginning around the Autumn equinox. This is when the long, dry and hot summer is over, the rains begin to wet the parched earth and the first plowing for the winter sowing (as mentioned in the Gezer calendar) takes place. This calendar is still kept today by Jews all over the world, as well as in by the state of Israel.
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An ancient civilization highly depending on rains is the Hindu. This is how the Indian climate is described in a modern almanac (s. site): “It is possible to identify seasons, although these do not occur uniformly throughout South Asia. The Indian Meteorological Service divides the year into four seasons: the relatively dry, cool winter from December through February; the dry, hot summer from March through May; the southwest monsoon from June through September when the predominating southwest maritime winds bring rains to most of the country; and the northeast, or retreating, monsoon of October and November.”
Some societies, not wanting to give up their lunar calendar in favor of a seasonal one, have found various ways of compromising between these two ways of counting months, seasons, years. Some do it by adding a thirteenth month every certain number of years in a cycle of 19 years, as the Jews do; others, like the Chinese, do it in a different way, as described in the Widipedia (s. site): “Chinese months follow the phases