that the‘seasons’—which means perhaps the Egyptian calendar months,
named after the seasons—would accord‘with the now existing order of the
universe’—i.e. would remain forever in the same relation to the heavenly
bodies as they were in 238BCE. Moreover, this measure would prevent some
of the public feasts from occurring in the wrong seasons:‘that it may not
happen that some of the public feasts held in the winter (ååØìþí,peret) are
ever held in the summer (ŁÝæïò,shemu)... and that others of those now held
in the summer are held in the winter in future times’(ll. 40–3).^39 The text
concludes,finally, that this royal decree and calendar reform would correct the
‘former defect in the arrangement of the seasons and the year and in the beliefs
about the whole ordering of the heavens’.
Thisfinal point, but also the decree as a whole, convey very clearly a feeling
that the civil calendar had been faulty or defective. This feeling is unlikely to
have been shared by many Egyptians, and was certainly a very new idea.
Although the phrase‘winter in the summer, or summer in the winter’echoes
the passage from pap. Anastasi iv (cited above) and confirms the suggestion
that this was a literary topos (Weill 1926: 110), in that earlier source the phrase
was only used, as we have seen, to complain about bad weather or failure of
seasons. The Canopus decree is thefirst known source where this phrase was
employed as a critique of the civil calendar.^40
It is highly significant that the perception of the Egyptian civil calendar as
defective and in need of reform appears for thefirst time in a document from
the Ptolemaic period. This new perception was almost certainly related to the
new political situation that the Hellenistic dynasty in Egypt had ushered in.
The proposal to reform the calendar is most unlikely, indeed, to have origi-
nated from some internal, age-old Egyptian tradition. It is true that the decree
of Canopus was allegedly issued by Egyptian‘chief-priests, priests, prophets,
and sacred scribes’(ll. 3–5), and draws on a number of native Egyptian
traditions (such as the association of the New Year with the rising of Sothis).
But on linguistic and literary grounds it has been argued that the base text
(^39) Pfeiffer (2004: 131–5) renders the Greek and demotic versions as‘winter’and‘summer’,
and the Hieroglyphic version asperetandshemu. The text may be playing on the double
meaning (in an Egyptian context) of‘winter’and‘summer’as both calendar periods (of four
months each) and natural seasons, and thus mean that‘feasts in (calendar) winter months
should not be celebrated in the (natural) summer season’(and vice versa). Clagett (1989–99: ii.
328) translates the Egyptian text as follows:‘feasts [originally] celebrated in Peret (winter) should
not be celebrated in Shemu (summer)’(and vice-versa). The term‘originally’, however, is not in
the text and implies a historical consciousness which is far from evident. 40
In contrast with pap. Anastasi, which as we have seen belongs to a period when the
calendar was roughly in line with the seasons and hence the topos‘winter in the summer,
summer in the winter’was unlikely to be used as a critique of the calendar, the Canopus decree
was composed in a period when winter feasts (e.g. of Choiak and of Nehebkau: see above, n. 35)
were actually occurring in the summer, thus when the topos is more likely to have been used with
reference to the civil calendar.
The Egyptian Calendar 139