Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

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5 Fragmentation: Babylonian and Julian Calendars in the Near East, Third CenturyBCE–Seventh CenturyCE In the previous chapters w ...

thefirst millenniumBCEwas followed in later Antiquity by their fragmenta- tion. This interpretation, however, is over-simplistic ...

patriotism and a sense (albeit somewhatfictitious) of political autonomy. The partial adaptation to the Julian calendar, and par ...

will make it even more difficult, and indeed increasingly pointless, to identify any given calendar as essentially‘Macedonian’,‘ ...

the Seleucid calendar differ from the Babylonian: its New Year was not in the spring but in the autumn. The Macedonian autumn mo ...

year of Antiochus’ IV death is given as 149SE, whereas we know from Babylonian Astronomical Diaries that his death was around mo ...

to have begun the year in the autumn. Thus a document from Dura-Europos dated 87CEin the month of Panemos refers to a transactio ...

in rabbinic sources: according to Mishnah,RoshHa-Shanah1: 1 (early third centuryCE),‘There are four New Years: the 1st of Nisan ...

The other double dates, from the Seleucid period, are inferable from three third-centuryBCEastronomical reports cited in Ptolemy ...

It is evident from the year of Nabonassar, as well as from the astronom- ical data associated with these dates, that the‘Chalda ...

referred to it.^22 This conclusion, however, is overconfident. The sources presented above do not prove that the Macedonian cale ...

and administratively more expedient, to use Macedonian month-names for Babylonian months and thus to assimilate the former to th ...

in the various regions of the Empire.^24 In the Seleucid period, for the same reason, discrepancies could have arisen between Ma ...

The bilingual ostracon from el-Kōm Calendar assimilation was a complex process in which the separate identity of the calendars—M ...

sections of a loan record between the Idumaean Qosyada and the Greek Nikēratos (the former, in Aramaic, the statement of Qosyada ...

tendency, driven by the political context of the large empires, stands in contrast with contemporary Greece, where, as we have s ...

calendars of the post-Seleucid and Roman Near East, and in some cities and kingdoms of post-Seleucid Asia Minor.^35 These calend ...

Change In other ways, however, the calendars of post-Seleucid city states and king- doms developed their own, distinctive charac ...

precisely what needs to be questioned.^41 This question is prompted, in partic- ular, by the observation that by thefirst centur ...