stretching from the Taurus (northern Syria) to the Zagros (east of Mesopota-
mia), and included all the satrapies beyond them to the north (e.g. Cappadocia
and Armenia) and to the east (e.g. Sogdiana and Bactria, Sistan, and parts of
Elam). It is in these regions, which had never been under Assyrian or Babylo-
nian dominion, that the Persian Zoroastrian calendar became particularly well
established, as we have seen, already under Achaemenid rule.
It is significant to note, indeed, that no attempt was ever made to introduce
the new Persian calendar in Babylonia, Mesopotamia, and other parts of the
former neo-Babylonian Empire, where use of the Babylonian calendar was
long established and would have been difficult to abolish. Even in Egypt, where
the native civil calendar was actually identical with the new Persian calendar
(which had been based on it), the Babylonian calendar was used as the
imperial calendar. The appearance of Babylonian dates in official documents
in Egypt (sometimes alongside Egyptian dates) can be partly explained as
being appropriate to the Aramaic language they are written in; it may also be
related to the Babylonian ethnicity of some of the imperial officials involved.
But the Babylonian calendar was also used in Egypt by ethnically Persian
officials in their own, internal correspondence.^71 This confirms that in the
West, the Babylonian calendar was consistently treated by Persians as the
official imperial calendar.
The profound calendrical cleavage that was thus marked out by the Taur-
us–Zagros mountain range with, as official imperial calendars, the Babylonian
calendar to its south and west and the Persian Zoroastrian calendar to its
north and east, was the result of an Achaemenid policy which had a long-term
historical effect. Until the end of Antiquity, indeed, the dominant calendar in
Mesopotamia and the Levant remained the Babylonian calendar (albeit
adapted, in some regions, to the Julian calendar, as will be discussed in detail
in Chapter 5), whereas in Iran and the outlying regions of Choresmia,
Sogdiana, possibly Bactria, Armenia, and Cappadocia, the official calendar
was the Persian Zoroastrian. Nevertheless, in the northern and eastern satra-
pies the policy was not consistently or continuously implemented, as the
Babylonian calendar was also used at times for official purposes.We know
at least that in the last decades of the Achaemenid Empire the (Persian) satrap
of Bactria was dating his documents according to the Babylonian calendar,
even though one of his letters includes a Persian Zoroastrian date (see above,
n. 62). The Sogdian and Bactrian use of Babylonian month-names also
suggests, as noted above (near n. 47), that the Babylonian calendar was used
in these regions in about the same period. After the end of the Achaemenid
period, the Persian Zoroastrian calendar is likely to have declined in the
(^71) e.g. the shipyard journal from Memphis, dating from 473– 471 BCE, uses Egyptian and
Babylonian dates and involves people with Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian names: Porten and
Yardeni (1986–99) iii. 194–204 (no. C3. 8).
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 187