Roman-period inscriptions presents itselfasafullyfixed scheme, clearly
reflecting the influence of Romanfastiand the Julian calendar (Chapter 6).
These major changes, which unfolded in the centuries between 500 BCEand
300 CEand to which no ancient calendar appears to have been immune, can all
be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the spread and dissemination of the
Egyptian calendar during the second half of thefirst millenniumBCE.As
mentioned above, thefixed 365-day year calendar of ancient Egypt was unique
in the mid-first millenniumBCE, and best regarded, asIhave argued inChapter
3, as a peculiarity of Egyptian society and religion.Yet in the space of a few
centuries, this calendar or its modelbecame dominant throughout the ancient
world. The Achaemenidsfirst appropriated it around 500 BCEas the basis of a
newPersianZoroastrian calendar that became officialcalendar in the north-
ern and eastern parts of the Achaemenid Empire. ThePersianZoroastrian
calendar retained allthe features of its Egyptian counterpart, with the only
exception of month names and of the NewYear date; the result was that
already in thefifth–fourth centuriesBCEan Egyptian-type calendar couldbe
found stretching fromCappadocia and Armenia to the remote regions of
Bactria,Choresmia, and Sogdiana, deep intoCentral Asia. Later, in the
Hellenistic period, the Egyptian calendar was exported under thePtolemies
to their possessions in Libya,Cyprus, and elsewhere in the east Mediterranean,
including possibly Judaea, where it may have been adapted to form the
Qumran 364-day calendar.In thefinalstage, it was the Egyptian 365-day
year that provided JuliusCaesar with a modelfor his innovative, schematic,
and solar‘Julian’calendar, eventually to become–in its revised Gregorian
form–the universalcalendar in today’s world(Chapter 4).
The spread of the Egyptian calendar and its transformative effect on the
calendars of the ancient world demands an explanation. The evolution of
ancient calendars fromlunar to solar, from empiricalto schematic, and from
flexibletofixed, cannot be simply explained as the result of Egyptian influence,
because except for the short-lived and relatively restrictedPtolemaic Empire,
there is no historicalcontext within which such influence could have been
exerted by Egypt over the rest of the civilized world.It was not the inevitable
outcome of some deterministic progression from‘primitive’to‘advanced’;
indeed, the evolution of calendars hadlittle to do with what we wouldcall
scientific progress (see Introduction). Greek cities such as Athens, where
knowledge of astronomy was easily available (atleast in theHellenistic and
Roman periods), stubbornly retained theirflexible, unpredictablelunar calen-
dars untilthe end of Antiquity; whilst other societies with farless knowledge of
astronomy, such as Qumran and more generally Judaea in the third–first
centuriesBCE, produced some of the most sophisticated schematic calendars
that we have encountered (Chapters 4. 2, 7. 1 ). This is because the reckoning of
calendars was not a scientific pursuit, but a socialactivity; their history was
Conclusion 427