this period, unpredictable intercalations on which information could take
several months to be communicated to the more remote regions of the empire.
As a result, the Babylonian calendar in Elephantine (southern Egypt) had to be
improvised and occasionally differed from its central reckoning in Babylonia,
which may have led, at times, to some administrative confusion. In Chapter 2,
I argued that the introduction offixed intercalation schemes in the Babylonian
calendar was an Achaemenid policy designed to facilitate calendrical unifor-
mity and hence administrative efficiency. The radical innovation of the Per-
sian Zoroastrian calendar, which consisted in disseminating an Egyptian
calendar to distant Persia and even further satrapies, was even more clearly
the outcome of a deliberate, calendrical policy. As afixed calendar, this new
365-day scheme was particularly well suited for establishing uniformity of
calendrical practice in the northern and eastern satrapies. The choice of the
Egyptian civil calendar for this purpose would have been justified by the fact
that this was the onlyfixed calendar that the Persians could draw on as a
model, in this period, from anywhere in the ancient world. Its adoption and
spread in the Achaemenid Empire was thus not the result of Egyptian influ-
ence, but rather the indirect result of the sudden expansion of great empires in
the Near East. The geo-political extent of the Achaemenid Empire far
exceeded that of its foregoers, bringing about much greater problems of
communications, administration, and central imperial control. The institution
of afixed calendar was an appropriate way of overcoming some of these
difficulties.
Other possible explanations for the adoption of the Egyptian calendar are
more directly related to the Achaemenid conquest of Egypt in 525BCE. The
institution of a new imperial calendar, distinct and very different from the
Babylonian, may have represented a bid of the Achaemenids to carve for
themselves an independent, competing identity. In this political-ideological
context, the choice of the Egyptian calendar would have had particular
advantages. Egypt was one of the wealthiest provinces of the Achaemenid
Empire, and thus one of its most prized possessions. The Achaemenids had
good reason to be proud of it, since despite numerous attempts, their Assyrian
and Babylonian predecessors had never successfully conquered it.^79 The
Achaemenid appropriation of the Egyptian calendar, far from representing
submission to a foreign culture, may thus have been intended on the contrary
as a demonstration and showpiece of Persia’s unrivalled imperial expansion.
Although we have no explicit evidence of Achaemenid motivations, we may
assume that it is through political and imperialistic processes of this kind that
the Egyptian calendar was adopted in Persia, and then disseminated, slightly
(^79) Except for a short period by the Assyrians in 674– 664 BCE: Kuhrt (1995) ii. 634–6.
190 Calendars in Antiquity