New Year’s Resolutions? Blame it on the Babylonians

Historians generally agree that the ancient Babylonians are responsible for bringing New Year’s resolutions into the world about 4,000 years ago.

Writing for History.com, Sarah Pruitt of Portsmouth, N.H., said the Babylonians held an annual 12-day religious festival to celebrate the arrival of a new year that coincided with the spring equinox.

 

This marked the beginning of the spring planting season, and the Babylonians traditionally made promises to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed, such as farm implements and tools. 

“If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favor on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favor – a place no one wanted to be,” Pruitt said.

Sarah Pruitt

 

“These promises could be considered the forerunners of our New Year’s resolutions,” she wrote. 

At this point in the story, a young reader may ask: “What happened to the Babylonians?” In the end, they were conquered by the Persians in 539 B.C. At its peak, the Babylonian Empire controlled the “Fertile Crescent” in the Middle East, situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, stretching south to the Persian Gulf. 

The great City of Babylon was located about 50 miles south of Baghdad. Most of the original Babylonian territory is now within the borders of present-day Iraq. 

In 46 B.C., Roman Emperor Julius Caesar created the Julian calendar and declared Jan. 1 as New Year’s Day. January was named for the god Janus, the two-faced god whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches. 

“Believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year,” Pruitt said.

 

Katie Birtles, a freelance writer from Perth, Australia, noted that in 1671, Lady Anne Halkett of England wrote a diary entry that contained several pledges, which she titled as “resolutions.” One that has been frequently cited was: “I will not offend anymore.” 

Perhaps that is the ultimate personal civility challenge for humankind.

Katie Birtles

Birtles also commented that “by 1802, the tradition of making (and failing to keep) New Year’s resolutions was common enough that people satirized the practice.” 

One satirist was Thomas Walker, publisher of Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, also known as the Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge, a general-interest magazine published monthly in Dublin, Ireland. 

Walker wrote a series of “joke resolutions.” Noteworthy was: “Statesmen have resolved to have no other object in view than the good of their country” as well as “Physicians have determined to…prescribe no more than is necessary, and to be very moderate in their fees.” 

Modern-day humorist Blake Flannery of Indianapolis, Ind., has compiled a list of “funny resolutions that you can laugh at before you set yourself up for failure this year.” Here are some that might tickle your fancy.

Blake Flannery

 

“Stop drinking orange juice after I’ve just brushed my teeth.” 

“Go back to school…to avoid paying my student loans.” 

“Keep it to myself that I have trouble with authority when I’m being interviewed for a job.” 

“Lose weight by stop buttering my doughnuts.”

 

“Visit the grocery more often than restaurants, especially when free samples are being served.”

 

“Borrow things more often. Return them less often.” 

(Egads. Now we’ve come full circle. Blake Flannery should prepare to be haunted by the old gods of Babylonia.)