Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

Sothis, whereas the new lunar calendar was regulated by the civil calendar, with thefirst lunar month always following the civil ...

gradually shifted towards the day offirst visibility of the new moon, which was surely not the original intention of the creator ...

The recent discovery of additional double-dated documents which do not agree with the cycle of pap. Carlsberg 9 (even on Parker’ ...

below (whereas pap. Carlsberg 9 is written in Demotic). But some Ptolemaic- period Demotic documents suggest that even in an‘Egy ...

The 25-year cycle and the Ptolemaic Macedonian calendar Although there was thus no standard‘new’lunar calendar, the appearance o ...

was of Macedonian origin,^87 but as we shall see this is unlikely for several reasons. Little is known about the Macedonian cale ...

The principle of biennial intercalation is mentioned in one passage in Herodotus (1. 32),^94 which means that Philadelphus could ...

calendar didnotconform to Parker’s cycle; it could have been based instead, for example, on empirical observation of the new moo ...

least, the 25-year lunar cycle in this Greek document is likely to have had some relevance to the Macedonian lunar calendar.^103 ...

tied to the civil calendar.^106 Although, as argued above, this early schematic calendar may have been intended purely as a work ...

dates from the sixth and second centuriesBCE, the lunar months are ascribed the same nomenclature as in the civil calendar.^110 ...

although we detect, at least by the Ptolemaic period, a development towards representations of a continuous lunar month, the foc ...

widely: the lunar month could begin at the disappearance of the old moon or alternatively one day later, and it could be based o ...

the early third millenniumBCE) was inadequate for the economy and admin- istration of a‘well-organized kingdom’; the civil calen ...

unstable in relation to the solar year (drifting by one day every four years). In practice, therefore, it was impossible for any ...

inflexibility is regarded as a virtue for calendars, which is why modern scholars have not questioned the assumption that the ru ...

To give a better account of the civil calendar as an inherent structure and a constitutive part of Egyptian society and culture, ...

4 The Rise of the Fixed Calendars: Persian, Ptolemaic, and Julian Calendars Before the sixth centuryBCE, nearly all the calendar ...

ways. The Persians and their satrapies far to the north and the east adopted the Egyptian calendar almost whole piece; Julius Ca ...

instrument for the administrative needs of the Egyptian kingdom. The calen- dar was not merely a technical device, but a core el ...