Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

kata theoncalendars in the Hellenistic period, and some regularization of the civil calendars under Seleucid influence, particul ...

2 The Babylonian Calendar Sources from Mesopotamia and the Levant of the third and second millennia BCEreveal the existence of n ...

(sixth–fourth centuriesBCE). In this period, the Babylonian calendar was used as official imperial calendar by Persian satraps a ...

less on the same dates; the differences between them would have been mainly only nomenclatural. These calendars lent themselves ...

the political and religious status which astrologers held in Mesopotamian society, together with their astronomical expertise, e ...

were transmitted from astrologers to the king and on the basis of which calendrical decisions were often made suggests that the ...

THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH The new moon It is generally agreed that the Babylonian month began, in principle, when the new moo ...

would havefirst become visible. Thus the lunar, planetary, and stellar posi- tions supplied and dated by the Diaries according t ...

calendar months.^20 The purpose and function of month-length prediction, indeed, was not necessarily calendrical: it may have fu ...

of beginning the new month on day 30withouta sighting, e.g. purely on the basis of a new moon prediction, is apparently not cons ...

Bullut:u is clear that only bad weather had prevented the new moon from being seen on the‘29th’; by the next evening, indeed, th ...

Other letters confirm that reports of new moon sightings were frequently sent from various Assyrian cities to the royal court at ...

of his letter appears to be polemical: either against some other astrologer, or perhaps even against the king himself. In any ca ...

procedure embody the centralizing force of the king over the cities of the empire, but it also turned the standard Babylonian ca ...

in the early Achaemenid period), these decisions were based more than ever on the astronomical expertise that would have been of ...

contrast is evident, for example, in 522BCEwhen the same month is accurately given 29 days in the Astronomical Diaries, and a 30 ...

and beyond.^49 Thus an early Achaemenid-period letter from a temple official in Larsa to a colleague in Uruk mentions receiving ...

67 – 8), not only in documents written at the end of the month, but also in documents written earlier in the month and anticipat ...

over in astronomical writings as a schematic, ideal year, and continued being used in this context until the Seleucid period.^57 ...

through some sort of calculation.^58 The Diaries clearly imply in these cases that sunset and moonset, and therefore the sun and ...