inflexibility is regarded as a virtue for calendars, which is why modern scholars
have not questioned the assumption that the rulers of the‘well-organized’
kingdom of Egypt preferred afixed calendar. There are, however, considerable
advantages in a calendar that isflexible and open to adjustment. I am not
referring to the possibility of correcting errors or discrepancies, e.g. (in the
context of the Egyptian calendar) the drift of one day in four years. In
functional terms, this discrepancy was not necessarily problematic (and as
we have seen, there is no evidence that it was ever regarded as a problem, until
the decree of Canopus in 238BCE). I am referring rather to the possibility of
controlling months and years for purposes extraneous to the regulation of the
calendar itself. As we have seen in previous chapters, the rulers of Greek city
states and (perhaps to a lesser extent) of Mesopotamian empires reserved the
right to set the beginning of the months and the intercalations for reasons that
were not always calendrical, though not necessarily for that matter directed
towards their own self-seeking advantage. The political, economic, religious,
and other social benefits of calendarflexibility were certainly well appreciated,
for example, in the city states of ancient Greece (see Chapter 1). In a‘well-
organized’kingdom like Egypt, the kings might have profited from a calendar
that wasflexible and under their control. By instituting the civil calendar, they
effectively abdicated an important source of political power and social control.
The issue is not simply whether the civil calendar was particularly suited to
the needs of ancient Egypt, or whether the calendrical needs of the kingdom of
Egypt were different from those of other kingdoms. I would like to argue that
in the context of calendars, the functionalist argument outlined above—
whereby calendars are conceived of entirely in terms of their function, e.g.
administrative—is reductionist and thereforeflawed. A functionalist argu-
ment reduces calendars to tools (or‘instruments’, in Parker’s word), suggest-
ing somehow that they are objects that societies use; but this conception is far
too restrictive. In actual fact, calendars are among the inherent structures of
political processes, economic activity, religion, and the rest of social life; they
are also a formative part of the culture, world view, and ideology of the
societies that use them. Calendars must therefore be viewed as constitutive
parts of society and culture, rather than as instruments that are only there
because they are useful (see Introduction). The same applies, indeed, to any
other aspect of culture and society in ancient Egypt: no one would seek to
argue that anthropomorphic sarcophagi or hieroglyphs, for example, were
mere‘instruments’for the disposal of dead bodies or for writing, or that they
were used in Egypt because they were functionally more suited to ancient
Egyptian society. The institution of the Egyptian civil calendar in the early
third millennium BCEand its maintenance, unchanged, over a staggering
period of nearly three millennia (no doubt a world record) are a complex
socio-cultural phenomenon that cannot be explained purely in terms of the
calendar’s administrative usefulness and efficiency.
The Egyptian Calendar 165