To give a better account of the civil calendar as an inherent structure and
a constitutive part of Egyptian society and culture, it could be suggested for
example that afixed, homogeneous, and unchanging calendar was particu-
larly congruous to Egyptian religious ideology in which the ideas of cosmic
order, stability, permanence, and eternity were particularly valued and
emphasized.^123 Whilst this approach may not suffice, perhaps, to explain
the origins of the civil calendar or its remarkable longevity in Egypt, it does
clearly situate this calendar in the broader socio-cultural context of ancient
Egypt, and explains more satisfactorily why it differed so radically from all
other calendars in the ancient world.
In this light, we may legitimately wonder why, as we shall see in the next
chapter, the Egyptian calendar and its derivatives were adopted in the second
half of thefirst millenniumBCEby the other peoples of the Mediterranean and
Near East, eventually supplanting, by the end of Antiquity, virtually all other
calendars in the ancient world. As I have suggested at the beginning of this
chapter, it is not that the Egyptian calendar was regarded, for whatever reason,
as intrinsically superior to theirs; in fact the Greeks, who were among the
earliest to commend it, probably remained the most resistant to its adoption.
The spread of the Egyptian calendar could not have been due directly to
imperial expansionism, since of all the Near Eastern and Mediterranean
powers, Egypt in this period was least involved—or least successful—in
building an empire of any significant size beyond the valley of the Nile.
In the next chapter, I shall argue that the spread of the Egyptian calendar
was the cumulative result of a haphazard sequence of events, attributable to
discrete and specific historical circumstances; but that from a broader, macro-
historical perspective, the spread of thefixed, Egyptian calendar to other parts
of the Mediterranean and the Near East can be related to the wider, socio-
political changes that were brought about by the rise of the great empires of
late Antiquity. How exactly these processes were interrelated is a question that
will be explored in the next chapter. But it remains remarkable, in any event,
that in spite of its uniqueness and radical differences from the mainly lunar
calendars of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, the Egyptian calendar
succeeded eventually in playing the most decisive part in the history of
calendars in later Antiquity.
(^123) See e.g. Bomhard (1999) 2–4 and especially J. Yoyotte in his foreword to this work ibid.,
p. xi). On the meaning of‘eternity’in this context, see Stern (2003a) 113–14. On the relationship
between calendars, world view, and ideology, cf. Stern (1996).
166 Calendars in Antiquity