not calendar reform for its own sake, but rather to enforce the political
subservience of the Egyptian priestly elite to the Ptolemaic dynasty, by getting
it to accept a modification of its ancestral calendar (alongside the institution of
a new festival in honour of the rulers). The disorder of the Macedonian
calendar, in contrast, was irrelevant to this political objective; Euergetes’
choice not to reform it remained entirely his own prerogative. As in the
context of many other ancient calendars, we should expect the driving force
behind the Canopus decree to be political control rather than calendar
accuracy.
Indeed, for the purpose of correcting the civil calendar, the decree of
Canopus was actually inadequate. The proposal was only to add an epagome-
nal day every four years, and thus to arrest the drift of the calendar and
maintain it in its current position; but there was no proposal to realign the
festivals and calendar months with the natural seasons. This is paradoxical,
because the decree mentions explicitly that the day on which the star of Isis
(i.e. Sothis) rises‘is reckoned in the sacred writings to be the New Year’(l. 36);
yet the decree was tofix this event for ever on 1 Payni (II Shemu 1), three
months before the calendar’s New Year on I Akhet 1. Furthermore, the
rationale of the decree was to prevent the occurrence of‘winter feasts in
the summer’, yet this is precisely how they would have remained, for ever,
had the decree been heeded. If anything, the decree of Canopus would have
exacerbated the problem, by making it impossible for the festivals ever to
return to their right natural season (Pfeiffer 2004: 255).
The reason why the Canopus decree did not seek to realign the months can
easily be explained. The addition of one day every four years was only a minor
adjustment, but the re-alignment of months—which would have necessitated
the omission of three whole calendar months in the year of the reform—would
have had major religious implications, as the festivals due in these months
could not have been celebrated in that year. The Egyptian priesthoods were
unlikely to be willing to comply with such a drastic measure, and Ptolemy
Euergetes must have been well aware of this. The decree of Canopus may thus
be interpreted as a politically cautious half-measure.^45
But even the addition of an extra epagomenal day every four years, as
decreed at Canopus, seems not to have been successfully implemented: for
the evidence indicates that the civil calendar continued drifting until the end
of the Ptolemaic period (latefirst centuryBCE).^46 There is every reason to
assume that this part of the decree of Canopus was blocked, directly or
(^45) SeeWeill (1926) 56–8.
(^46) Whereupon the Roman-period Alexandrian calendar was instituted: see Ch. 5. For evi-
dence and discussion of this widely accepted view, see Pfeiffer (2004) 250–1 and Bennett < http://
http://www.tyndalehouse.com/Egypt/ptolemies/chron/chronology.htm> (also, but less convincingly,
Clagett 1989–99: ii. 331–1). Nevertheless, Bennett (2011) demonstrates on the basis of some
double-dated documents that until at least the mid-2nd-c.BCE, a Canopic scheme was assumed
The Egyptian Calendar 141