tendency, driven by the political context of the large empires, stands in
contrast with contemporary Greece, where, as we have seen (Chapter 1),
even one-day differences between the lunar calendars of different city states
were still cultivated and meticulously recorded in the inscriptions.^33 In the
Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires, in contrast, calendars were assimilated and
differences suppressed.
- POST-SELEUCID CALENDARS
In the post-Seleucid world, this assimilatory trend was dramatically reversed.
The disintegration of the Seleucid Empire was a gradual process that lasted
through almost its entire history, with the secession of Bactria in the mid-third
centuryBCE, then the secession of Parthia, Armenia, and most of Asia Minor
by the early second centuryBCE, the loss of Babylonia to the Parthians in 141
BCE, the secession of Judaea and other Levantine kingdoms and city states
around the same period, andfinally, Pompey’s defeat of the last Seleucid king
in Syria, in 65– 62 BCE.^34 It is important to note, therefore, that what I shall
refer to as‘post-Seleucid period’did not begin in all places at the same time.
The break-up of the Seleucid Empire into smaller kingdoms and states—which
I shall refer to, again, as‘post-Seleucid’—led, as we shall see, to calendar
fragmentation and differentiation.
ContinuityThe kingdoms and states that succeeded the Seleucid Empire retained, in the
first instance, the Macedonian and Babylonian calendars that had served as
official calendars of the Seleucids. The Parthian kingdom is probably the most
important example: Macedonian month-names are used in the corpus of
Parthian coins from the mid-first centuryBCEto the mid-first centuryCE,
and clearly functioned as one of the Parthian official calendars (Assar 2003).
The Macedonian or Babylonian calendar is also well attested in other parts of
the post-Seleucid world. Macedonian month-names (in Greek) or their Baby-
lonian equivalents (in Semitic languages such as Aramaic) are found in most
(^33) e.g. an inscription from 166BCEdated 26 XI in the calendars of Athens and Ambrakia, and
27 XI in that of Akarnania; or a treaty of 196BCEdated 16 Pyanopsion according to the Milesians
and 15 Hagneon according to the Magnesians (Ch. 1, near n. 52; note that by 196BCE, Miletus
and Magnesia were no longer under Seleucid control).
(^34) For a more nuanced assessment of the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire, see Sherwin-
White and Kuhrt (1993), esp. 84–90 (Parthians), 107–11 (Bactria), and 217–18 (Seleucid
‘decline’).
246 Calendars in Antiquity