from one place to the next, depending on whether a “leap” month was being added in
that region or not (on leap months, see below), calendars did not necessarily dovetail.^25
Thus, the crown bureaucracy of the Third Dynasty developed a calendar for use in
supra-regional administration: we usually refer to it by a German term Reichskalender,
coined by B. Landsberger in 1915 (Sallaberger 1993 : 38 ). The Reichskalendarseems to
have been intended to get around the problem of dozens of local calendars. Used by
representatives of the crown, such as scribes at the livestock center called in antiquity
Puzrish-Dagan, the Reichskalendarcould be used in provincial archives when the
transaction recorded was of importance to the royal sector (Sallaberger 1993 : 49 note
204 ). However, local transactions continued to be noted texts using only the local
calendar (Gomi 1979 : 1 ; Sallaberger 1999 : 236 ). We still have not figured how how some
local calendars synchronized with the Reichskalender.^26
The Reichskalendardid not survive the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Political
fragmentation resulted in little need for supra-regional administration. Local calendars,
which after all had continued to be used throughout the period, won the day.
IntercalationA major problem with the third millennium calendar derives from the discrepancy
between the lunar and solar calendars. The figure of 365 days is based on the solar year.
A purely lunar calendar consists of fewer than 365 days: if half the months were twenty-
nine days and half were thirty, one arrives at 354 days, or eleven days short of 365
(Horowitz 1996 : 37 ). Obviously, over time, one will end up celebrating the harvest-time
month in the dead of winter, and so on.
To fix the slippage, extra time was added to the calendar. In second and first millen-
nium Mesopotamia, this appears to have been done fairly regularly.^27 The Sumerians
called these months “extra” (dirig) or “double” (min): modern scholars usually refer to
them as leap months or intercalations. One ought to have an intercalation once every
three years, or a total of seven intercalation for a nineteen-year period, for the calendar
to run smoothly.^28 But for whatever reason, the various local authorities did not appear
to add intercalations regularly at all times or in all places. Even in periods of central-
ization such as the Third Dynasty of Ur, different regions intercalated as each saw fit.^29
This system clearly was flexible enough to allow intercalations when they appeared to
be called for, but variable enough that archivists could be confused about how many
months a given year contained, For that reason, archivists sometimes would label “file
folders” (literally, tablet baskets) to include not only the years covered in the file but
how many intercalations were made in that time.^30
Calendrical oddities
We would be deluding ourselves if we did not recognize that our own systems for
calendrical and temporal calculation are convoluted. Nevertheless, it is always a rude
awakening to think that one has mastered the intricacies of Mesopotamian calendri-
cal calculations, only to find repeated instances of seemingly inexplicable data. For
example, there are several instances when “years” had far too many months. As already
mentioned, Early Dynastic Lagash appears to have used forty full-length months per
year.^31 Even in the heart of the seemingly highly efficient Ur III period, we find–– Tonia Sharlach ––