patriotism and a sense (albeit somewhatfictitious) of political autonomy. The
partial adaptation to the Julian calendar, and partial retention of local calendar
traditions, reflected the mixed and ambiguous political allegiances of the cities
and provinces of the Roman East. In this respect, the processes under study in
Part II of this book are not simply, as suggested above, the reverse of those
discussed in Part I. This present chapter, in particular, does not depict the
undoing of thefixed, imperial calendars of earlier Antiquity, but rather the
complex processes, in later Antiquity, that involved at once adoption and
preservation of standard imperial calendars on the one hand, and their
challenging and disintegration on the other.^2
The various forms that Julian-type calendars were able to take in the Roman
Near East^3 refute, moreover, a simplistic historical determinism whereby the
rise of great empires automatically led to the standardization andfixation of
their calendars. Conversely, the preservation of the standard Babylonian
calendar in some of the fragmented post-Seleucid kingdoms and city states
shows that political fragmentation did not automatically lead to calendar
flexibility and diversification. In this chapter, more than in any of the preced-
ing chapters, it will become evident that the history of calendars was not
determinedby grand, macro-historical forces. Although the large-scale struc-
tures of the great empires were conducive to calendar integration and stan-
dardization, and conversely, small-scale political entities were conducive to
calendar differentiation, the changes that were made to calendars were always
a matter of choice. The decision, by various states and peoples, to alter their
calendar or switch over to an entirely different system was mostly political, but
often also based on religious, economic, and other specific considerations.
This raises the question, again, of whether we should be interpreting the
history of calendars in terms of general, macro-historical structures, or rather
on a discrete, case-by-case basis—a question that I deliberately leave open,
because it does not really have any simple answer.
Until now, the misleading impression may have been conveyed of a mono-
lithic and essentialist view of‘Greek’,‘Babylonian’, and‘Egyptian’calendars,
each with a separate chapter on its own (Chapters 1–3). It is only in Chapter 4
that the spread of the Egyptian calendar to areas far beyond Egypt has begun
to draw our attention to the transferability of calendrical traditions, and to the
consequent difficulty of referring, for example, to a particular calendar as
‘Persian’,‘Zoroastrian’, or still‘Egyptian’. From this chapter onwards, the
hybridity of calendars in the Seleucid, post-Seleucid, and Roman Near East
(^2) I use the term‘later Antiquity’in an unusually broad sense, since the period referred to
begins already in the 3rd c.BCE. This period is only‘late’in relation to the much earlier
calendars (especially Egyptian and Babylonian) that have been studied in Part I.
(^3) The term‘Near East’in this chapter (as in its title) will often be used in a broad sense to
include not only the Levant but also Egypt to the south and Asia Minor to the north.
Fragmentation: Babylonian and Julian Calendars 233