3
The Egyptian Calendar
The Egyptian calendar was probably the simplest calendar of the ancient
world. In contrast to the irregular, unpredictable calendars of Babylonia
and Greece, it was regular, changeless, andfixed. Its structure was almost
completely uniform: all months were of 30 days, and all years of 12 months.
The only anomaly was the addition of 5 days (the‘epagomenal’, i.e. additional,
days) at the end of each year, so as to bring its total length to 365 days.
Nilsson has written of this calendar that it was‘the greatest intellectual feat
in the history of time-reckoning’.^1 This is undoubtedly an overstatement. The
average or approximate solar year-length of 365 days is not very difficult,
empirically, to work out, hence not much of an intellectual feat. Besides, the
Egyptian calendar was not without deficiencies. As it did not have the equiva-
lent of our leap years, this calendar drifted away from the solar year by one day
every four years.
The excessive praise that is commonly bestowed on this calendar, by
Nilsson as well as other scholars, reflects to some extent a modern bias. The
modern attraction to the Egyptian calendar is partly due to its structural and
functional similarity to the present-day Gregorian calendar: it corresponds,
more than anything else in the ancient world, to what we expect nowadays of a
calendar. This, however, is no historical accident, as the origins of the Grego-
rian calendar go back to the Egyptian. As we shall see in the next chapter, the
Egyptian calendar was gradually adopted, in various shapes and forms, by the
peoples of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East; by the end of Antiquity,
it had displaced nearly all other calendars, resulting in the Julian and later the
(^1) Nilsson (1920) 280, cited in Depuydt (1997) 9. Similarly inflated statements are made in
later scholarship, e.g. Neugebauer (1969) 81:‘the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in
human history’; Hannah (2005) 88:‘extraordinary achievement’. Note, however, Neugebauer’s
earlier opinion (1942) that the Egyptian calendar, drifting by one day every four years, was
simple,‘primitive’, and only preserved unchanged out of an innate conservatism. The year-
length of 365 days, and its use in the form of afixed calendar, was actually not unique to Egypt in
the history of humanity: similarlyfixed calendars of 365 days were conceived and used, quite
independently from Egypt, by the civilizations of Central America from thefirst millenniumBCE
until the present day (see Edmonson 1988; Mesoamerican calendars, however, are outside the
scope of this work).