unstable in relation to the solar year (drifting by one day every four years). In
practice, therefore, it was impossible for anyone in Egypt to work out the
current date on the basis of either lunar observation or (except very approxi-
mately) seasonal phenomena. Accurate and reliable knowledge of the date
depended entirely on someone’s keeping a continuous day-by-day record of
the civil calendar.^120
This is not such a problem in highly literate societies like ours, which is why
it may have escaped the notice of modern scholars. In modern society, if one
does not know the date (as is still common in daily life), one can easily get it
from a daily newspaper, a wristwatch, a wall calendar, or—since the 1990s—a
mobile telephone or computer screen.We also have the benefit of another
count of days—the seven-day week—that can be used as a reference point
when working out a date.^121 But in ancient Egypt knowledge of the date would
have been exclusive to professional scribes or whoever else, presumably
literate, was able to keep a rigorous and continuous count of the calendar.
Ordinary people who needed to know the date for religious or other purposes
depended, for this, entirely on the literate. Thus although attractive to the
modernWestern mind (as I have argued at the beginning of this chapter), this
calendar would have been difficult to live with for much of the population of
ancient Egypt.
The challenge of keeping a continuous and unfailing count of the calendar is
also likely to have been a source of error, even for those who were in charge of
counting it. Again, there were no natural phenomena with reference to which
the calendar could be corrected if a day was missed or any other error
occurred. Significantly, it is neither reliability nor ease of use which Herodotus
chose to praise about the Egyptian calendar.^122 We should thus seriously
question to what extent the civil calendar would have been a‘simple and
easily workable instrument’(to cite again Parker) for the administration of the
Egyptian kingdom.
Another functional disadvantage of the civil calendar would have been,
paradoxically, its changelessness and inflexibility. From a modern perspective,
(^120) The same applies to the similarly schematic Mesoamerican calendars (based on 260-day
and 365-day years; see Edmonson 1988), of which the correct reckoning depended entirely on
the‘day-keepers’, a literate scribal priestly elite drawn from aristocracies and royal households
and often in positions of political leadership (Boone 2007: 20–8, Rice 2007: 48–50, 54–6; I am
grateful to Stanis 121 ław Iwaniszewski for his detailed advice).
Knowledge of the day of the week is helpful to us e.g. when using a wall calendar tofind
out today’s date. Alternatively, it can be used in mental calculations: if I know this month began
on a Tuesday, and today is also Tuesday, this can help me to establish that today’s date is e.g. the
15th (the same procedure can be carried out with reference to another memorable date and day
of the week, rather than thefirst day of the month). The seven-day week, however, was not
known in ancient Egypt.
(^122) Instead he praises its synchronism with the seasons: see citation at the beginning of this
chapter.
164 Calendars in Antiquity