out, this would not explain why the new equation became accepted—and
indeed, explicitly formulated—outside the Parthian kingdom, in post-Seleucid
states that became part of the Roman Empire.^73
The Parthian kingdom, however, was not the only post-Seleucid state where
the relation between Macedonian and Babylonian months was altered. As we
have seen, changes of this kind were particularly common in the city states of
the Near Eastern Mediterranean coast, where, as in the Parthian kingdom, the
Macedonian calendar was used alone without much regard for the Babylonian
calendar, and where excessive intercalation commonly caused it to deviate
from the latter. The shift in the equation of Macedonian and Babylonian
months was therefore not a punctual or local historical event, but rather the
cumulative effect of several post-Seleucid states over-intercalating their Mace-
donian calendars. This general tendency eventually led, by thefirst centuryCE,
to a perception that the relationship between the Macedonian and Babylonian
calendars had changed, and hence to a readjustment of the standard equiva-
lence between Macedonian and Babylonian months.
This change would only have been noticeable—indeed, would only have
mattered—in contexts where both calendars needed to be used: for example in
the bilingual Graeco-Palmyrene inscriptions, where the new equation is at-
tested explicitly for thefirst time. Josephus, writing in Greek about Hebrew- or
Aramaic-speaking Judaean Jews, needed to translate Babylonian into Mace-
donian month-names. The calendar of the province of Arabia was created by
translating, somewhat artificially, the local Nabataean Babylonian month-
names into Greek Macedonian equivalents. The same translation process
seems to have occurred, in reverse, when the Syrian calendar was assimilated
to the Antiochene Macedonian model. It appears therefore that the new
equation functioned, above all, as a conventional way of translating dates
from Aramaic to Greek or the reverse.
This new translation scheme would not necessarily have suited all calendars
in the Near East. In Ascalon, for example, where two excessive intercalations
had apparently been made by the end of thefirst centuryBCE, the local month
of Dios would have been more appropriately translated as Kislew than
(according to the new equation) as Marh:eshwan.We do not know how in
practice Ascalon would have translated its own months into Babylonian
equivalents, if ever this had been needed. But since the new equation, follow-
ing general trends in the post-Seleucid Near East, had established itself as
standard, it is quite likely to have been used, whenever necessary, in Ascalon
too.
anyway, a change in the New Year does not necessarily mean that the equation between
Macedonian and Babylonian month-names was redefined.
(^73) Bickerman loc. cit.
258 Calendars in Antiquity