This text raises immediately a problem, because the thirteenth centuryBCEis
precisely a period when the civil calendar conformed to the seasons (the civil
New Year coincided with the heliacal rising of Sothis around 1320BCE). This
was noted some time ago byWeill (1926) 55, 107–11, who rightly suggests that
by the time this document was written, the reference to‘winter coming in the
summer’was only a literarytopos. But although its meaning here was only
figurative,Weill argues that the origin of this literarytoposmust have been
calendrical: it must have originated, in other words, from a much earlier
period when the winter season had actually occurred in‘summer’, i.e. in the
calendar months ofshemu. However, there is no evidence that in this earlier
period, thetoposof‘winter coming in the summer’was intended as acriticism
of the drift of the civil calendar.
In a later article (1946),Weill suggests that the expression translated here as
‘wretched year’is a technical term, referring to a civil calendar year when it is
out of line with the Sothic year. Its opposite,‘happy year’, would refer to a civil
calendar year when it is in line with the Sothic year—or indeed to the Sothic
year itself—as attested in one other source: ‘the star (Sothis) rises at the
beginning of the happy year’.^37 This terminology would imply, at the very
least, a veiled criticism of the calendar when it had drifted away from the
seasons. This interpretation is possible, but the fact remains that the complaint
that is voiced in pap. Anastasi iv—written at a time when the calendar was in
line with the seasons—is most likely about bad weather or season failure, and
this is most likely what the phrase‘wretched year’is expressing here. This text
shows no clear evidence, therefore, of any complaint about the civil calendar.
Inasmuch as the drift of the civil calendar appears not to have been cause for
concern or complaint in ancient Egyptian society, there is no need to search
for the existence of an alternative, Sothic calendar. Even if a Sothic calendar is
inferred from the Ebers document, its use and function in Egyptian society
would have been so minimal that it could only have been of very marginal
importance. It is only with the advent of the Ptolemaic dynasty in the third
centuryBCE that attitudes towards the drift of the civil calendar began,
however, to change.
The decree of CanopusThe decree of Canopus, dated 17 Tybi year 9 of Ptolemy III Euergetes
(7 March 238BCE), is one of the few Egyptian texts that explicitly discuss the
Bomhard (1999) 8. The use ofperetandshemuin this seasonal sense is later attested in the
Canopus decree (see below), and later still in Coptic, where the derivative terms prw and swm
mean‘winter’and‘summer’(Depuydt 2007: 72).
(^37) Pap. Chester Beatty 1 (verso C 1. 1–2). See also Bomhard (1999) 8.
The Egyptian Calendar 137