ways. The Persians and their satrapies far to the north and the east adopted the
Egyptian calendar almost whole piece; Julius Caesar just used it as a model for
restructuring the Roman calendar year. In some cases, the adoption of the
Egyptian calendar by other nations was the result of Egyptian, or more
specifically Ptolemaic, territorial expansion (Cyrene, Cyprus, and possibly
Judaea). Elsewhere, on the contrary, it was the annexation of Egypt into
other empires that led to the appropriation of the Egyptian calendar by its
foreign rulers (Achaemenid Persian, and Roman).
In each of these cases, moreover, the Egyptian calendar was adopted or
emulated for very specific, local reasons. Julius Caesar’s reform of the calendar
was motivated by political conditions specific to late Republican Rome (as we
shall later see); he certainly did not conceive thefixation of the Roman
calendar as following some general trend or grand, macro-historical trajectory.
The trend towardsfixation that we discern in the calendars of the latefirst
millenniumBCE, and that we attribute or relate to the spread of the Egyptian
calendar, was uneven, disparate, and piecemeal.Whether we are justified to
interpret it as a general macro-historical pattern, and not as a fortuitous
amalgamation of discrete calendar changes occurring at different places and
times in the ancient world, needs further consideration. To some extent, the
question will have to be left open.
The main question to ask, in this context, is whether a unifying explanation
can be offered for the rise offixed calendars and calendarfixation in the
second half of thefirst millenniumBCE. I have already suggested in earlier
chapters thatfixation of calendars was related to the rise, in this period, of
increasingly large empires in the Near East and (slightly later) the Mediterra-
nean. These vast geo-political entities were hampered by limited communica-
tion resources. Besides the political, administrative, and military problems this
entailed, it had become impossible for politically controlled calendars to be
reckoned uniformly across the empires: for if the calendar depended on
monthly decisions by the king or ruler, these decisions could not be transmit-
ted to all parts of the empire before the next month was due. Fixed calendars,
however, could be reckoned uniformly across vast empires without any risk of
disruption. The introduction offixed and predictable calendars may thus have
been intended for the sake of administrative cohesion. This would explain why
the Egyptian calendar began to spread so successfully in this period (e.g. in the
Persian and Roman Empires), and why, by the Roman period, most calendars
had become completelyfixed.
This explanation is attractive and may lend some weight to a general,
macro-historical approach to the process of calendarfixation. However, it
assumes a very specific relationship between the calendar and imperial ad-
ministrative expediency, which may be over-restrictive. In the last chapter,
I criticized functionalist interpretations of the Egyptian calendar as a suitable
168 Calendars in Antiquity