indirectly, by the Egyptian priesthoods (Bickerman 1968: 41), even though we
have no report in the sources of any dispute or conflict on this account. The
Egyptians would have resisted the reform of the civil calendar for the simple
reason that they saw nothing wrong with it.^47 The arguments presented in the
text of the decree were probably not of their own making, and would have
appeared to them unjustified. Far more important, from their perspective,
would have been to preserve the calendar as it had always been for close to
three millennia.^48
- THE EGYPTIAN LUNAR CALENDAR
The lunar dates that appear in a number of Egyptian sources suggest that a
lunar calendar was reckoned alongside the civil calendar. Since these dates are
attested only in the context of the temples, i.e. their cults, festivals, and the
organization of the priesthoods, they have been legitimately identified as
belonging to a specifically cultic calendar.^49
In his influential work on Egyptian calendars, Richard Parker (1950) put
forward the theory that two lunar calendars were used in Egyptian history: an
‘old’lunar calendar, based on empirical sightings of the moon and regulated
by the heliacal rising of Sothis (on which see above), and a‘new’lunar
calendar, regulated by the civil calendar; the new calendar may have been
initially empirical and based on lunar sightings, but in the fourth centuryBCE,
it became completely schematic and cyclical—thus yielding, effectively, a
by some Egyptian calendar users. This suggests that the demise of the Canopic decree was neither
universal nor immediate.
(^47) There is no evidence of any formal prohibition, in Egyptian law, on altering the calendar.
Nigidius Figulus, a Roman intellectual of the mid-1st c.BCE, reports that at their royal initiation
rites, the kings of Egypt would be taken by a priest into the sanctuary of the temple of Isis and
there be adjured by oath not to intercalate a month or a day, nor to change the date of the
festivals, but only to keep the 365-day calendar as instituted by the ancients (cited in a scholium
to Germanicus’version of thePhaenomenaof Aratus: Legrand 1931: 201–2). But in the absence
of any parallel in Egyptian sources, this report is more likely to have been the product of
Hellenistic imagination (Weill 1928: 47, correcting an earlier statement in id. 1926: 57–8; see
also J. Yoyotte in Bomhard 1999: xiv). This legend may have been formed as a polemic against
Ptolemy III Euergetes—who would have been breaching such an oath in the decree of Canopus—
or much later, as a polemic against the leap year of the Julian calendar (see Pfeiffer 2004: 252
n. 255). Nigidius Figulus sided with Pompey during the civil wars, and was consequently sent
into exile by Julius Caesar in 49BCE, where he died in March 45BCE(Legrand 1931: 13–5; Rawson
1985: 94); he thus lived long enough to be able to witness the institution of the Julian calendar,
and perhaps, to polemicize against it in this passage.
(^48) This raises the question of why, in contrast, the intercalation of an additional day every four
years was successfully instituted in the early Roman period. This will be discussed in Chapter 5.
(^49) Lunar dates are well attested e.g. in the archive from the temple of Illahun (lower Egypt,
between Memphis and Heracleopolis), dating from the 19th c.BCE, published by Luft (1992).
142 Calendars in Antiquity