An almanac (also spelled almanack and almanach) is an annual publication listing a set of events

forthcoming in the next year. It includes information like weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, tide
tables, and other tabular data often arranged according to the calendar. Celestial figures and various statistics
are found in almanacs, such as the rising and setting times of the Sun and Moon, dates of eclipses, hours of
high and low tides, and religious festivals. The set of events noted in an almanac may be tailored for a specific
group of readers, such as farmers, sailors, or astronomers.

The earlier texts considered to be almanacs have been found in the Near East, dating back to the middle of the
second millennium BC. They have been called generally hemerologies, from the Greek hēmerā, meaning
"day". Among them is the so-called Babylonian Almanac, which lists favorable and unfavorable days with
advice on what to do on each of them. Successive variants and versions aimed at different readership have
been found.[7] Egyptian lists of good and bad moments, three times each day, have also been found. Many of
these prognostics were connected with celestial events.[8][9][10] The flooding of the Nile valley, a most
important event in ancient Egypt, was expected to occur at the summer solstice but as the civil calendar had
exactly 365 days, over the centuries the date was drifting in the calendar.[11] The first heliacal rising of Sirius
was used for its prediction and this practice, the observation of some star and its connecting to some event
apparently spread.

The Greek almanac, known as parapegma, has existed in the form of an inscribed stone on which the days of
the month were indicated by movable pegs inserted into bored holes, hence the name. There were also
written texts and according to Diogenes Laërtius, Parapegma was the title of a book by Democritus.[12]
Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer (2nd century) wrote a treatise, Phaseis—"phases of fixed stars and
collection of weather-changes" is the translation of its full title—the core of which is a parapegma, a list of
dates of seasonally regular weather changes, first appearances and last appearances of stars or constellations
at sunrise or sunset, and solar events such as solstices, all organized according to the solar year. With the
astronomical computations were expected weather phenomena, composed as a digest of observations made
by various authorities of the past. Parapegmata had been composed for centuries.

Ptolemy believed that astronomical phenomena caused the changes in seasonal weather; his explanation of
why there was not an exact correlation of these events was that the physical influences of other heavenly
bodies also came into play. Hence for him, weather prediction was a special division of astrology

The origins of the almanac can be connected to ancient Babylonian astronomy, when tables of planetary
periods were produced in order to predict lunar and planetary phenomena.[14] Similar treatises called Zij
were later composed in medieval Islamic astronomy.

The modern almanac differs from Babylonian, Ptolemaic and Zij tables in the sense that "the entries found in
the almanacs give directly the positions of the celestial bodies and need no further computation", in contrast
to the more common "auxiliary astronomical tables" based on Ptolemy's Almagest. The earliest known
almanac in this modern sense is the Almanac of Azarqueil written in 1088 by Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī
(Latinized as Arzachel) in Toledo, al-Andalus. The work provided the true daily positions of the sun, moon and
planets for four years from 1088 to 1092, as well as many other related tables. A Latin translation and
adaptation of the work appeared as the Tables of Toledo in the 12th century and the Alfonsine tables in the
13th century