Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

Athenian origin is evident in their normal use of Athenian month-names, although recent discoveries reveal that the month-names ...

long-term time-reckoning frame; they are well attested in astronomical sources from the early third centuryBCEto the mid-first c ...

However, Julius Africanus probably only means that on average, over lengthy historical periods, intercalations in the Greek (and ...

astronomical calendars provided. This may explain why 19-year cycles appear to be followed, albeit not consistently, in parts of ...

and predictions between the early third centuryBCEand the mid-first century CE,^100 and it is likely to have been constructed pr ...

determined only with reference to astronomical phenomena. As Galen, in the second centuryCE, aptly explained: If all the nations ...

however, was never exploited by Greek historians. Astronomical calendars were invented by astronomers for their own use, and had ...

scholarly rationalization.^111 It illustrates how astronomical calendars could be used by afirst-centuryBCEHellenistic writer as ...

exceptionally, the entries are dated according to the Egyptian civil calendar— which, unlike Greek lunar calendars, wasfixed and ...

the city magistrates to determine whether to intercalate a month in the lunar calendar year.^119 If true, this might explain the ...

The phrasekata theon(orselenen) begins to appear in inscriptions from the third centuryBCE, where it appears to take on a calend ...

three calendars).^125 For this purpose, however, it would have been unnecessary to reckon a whole separate calendar (and all the ...

these were completely reliable andfixed.^129 This may explain whykata theon dates fade away from the beginning of thefirst centu ...

plausibly assumed that the Athenian calendar persisted unchanged until the fifth centuryCE.^133 The survival of flexible, politi ...

by primarilypoliticalfactors. The power of city magistrates to manipulate the calendar and tamper with it was clearly to their p ...

out to be unnecessary; although it could be argued that without it, the army would not have had the confidence to take the city. ...

itself.^145 Dunn notes a high incidence, in the epigraphic record, of intercala- tion of days at the ends of months—including in ...

‘illegitimate’, implicit in these paradigms, obscures the complexity of the political situations that led to manipulation of the ...

calendars independently from one another, Greek cities also employed differ- ent sets of month-names, which only enhanced their ...

were shared in common by these neighbouring cities.^154 Calendar uniformity is still evident in the leagues of Greek cities in t ...