Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

and Fifth Dynasties (normally dated to the third quarter of the third millenni- umBCE) indicate, on the accession of a new king, ...

This ingenuous argument depends, however, on a number of questionable assumptions. Firstly, it is based on a precise date for th ...

the archive confirm that this day was treated as a festival,^22 and so does a contemporary document from the temple of Amon-Re i ...

from the outset. According to this theory, the institution of the calendar cannot be dated exactly to 2781– 2778 BCE, but rather ...

be examined in some detail here and in the next section of this chapter.Written on the verso of a long medical papyrus, it conta ...

above), but to thefirst day of the year (as attested elsewhere).^32 This would account for its position at the beginning of the ...

in a purely notional or symbolic sense, without any need to construct a calendar beginning every year on that date.^34 The theor ...

This text raises immediately a problem, because the thirteenth centuryBCEis precisely a period when the civil calendar conformed ...

calendar. It was issued at Canopus, near Alexandria, in the form of a trilingual text (more precisely, Greek and Egyptian biling ...

that the‘seasons’—which means perhaps the Egyptian calendar months, named after the seasons—would accord‘with the now existing o ...

must have been the Greek, of which the Egyptian version (in hieroglyphic and demotic scripts) was only a translation.^41 All thi ...

not calendar reform for its own sake, but rather to enforce the political subservience of the Egyptian priestly elite to the Pto ...

indirectly, by the Egyptian priesthoods (Bickerman 1968: 41), even though we have no report in the sources of any dispute or con ...

three-stage history of the Egyptian lunar calendar. This theory has become the standard paradigm of all subsequent studies of th ...

Nevertheless, there are early traditions that suggest an association of the beginning of the Egyptian lunar month with invisibil ...

Empirical or schematic: the Illahun archive The practice of determining the lunar month on the basis of empirical observations o ...

following month-lengths (in days): 30–(29)– 30 – (30)– 30 – (29)– 30 – (29)– 30 – (29)–30 (brackets indicate months that are not ...

Intercalation and Sothic synchronism: the Ebers calendar As we have seen in previous chapters, lunar calendars need to be interc ...

According to this interpretation, the rising of Sothis would have played a critical, regulatory role in the lunar calendar. But ...

rule proposed in the Ebers calendar, may thus have remained somewhat ambiguous.^69 On this interpretation, the Ebers calendar pr ...