instrument for the administrative needs of the Egyptian kingdom. The calen-
dar was not merely a technical device, but a core element of society and
culture; it was notusedby society and culture, but ratherconstitutiveof
them. In this light, the relationship between thefixation of calendars and the
rise of the great empires need not be purely functional. Thefixed calendars of
Persia, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman Empire were not just useful for the
administration of the empires, but also active participants in the formation of
common, imperial cultures: the observance of the same Babylonian Seleucid
calendar from Elam to the Ionian coast must have contributed to the political,
social, and cultural cohesion (or to use a modern, fashionable term,‘globali-
zation’) of the Seleucid Empire,^2 and so,mutatis mutandis, the Julian calendar
in the Roman Empire.^3 On this basis I shall consider, at the end of this chapter,
the possibility of other, non-functionalist explanations for the rise offixed
calendars in the great empires of this period.
This chapter will trace the spread of the Egyptian calendar, and thus offixed
calendars, through three distinct phases: Achaemenid, Ptolemaic, and Roman.
These phases follow a chronological order but also represent a geographical
shift from East toWest. The weakest link in this chain will be the Ptolemaic
Empire, where paradoxically, the Egyptian calendar spread far less than in the
great empires that preceded and followed it.
- THE PERSIAN CALENDAR AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
The institution of afixed calendar in Persia and its diffusion in the eastern and
northern parts of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, at some point in the late
sixth orfifth centuryBCE, was a very radical change from earlier calendrical
practice. Our knowledge of the earlier calendar of Persia is limited, but it was
very clearly lunar. Most of the evidence belongs to the last decades of its
existence, when it was becoming assimilated to the Babylonian calendar. This
process of assimilation deserves attention, as it may provide a background to
the adoption of thefixed, Egyptian calendar soon after. Because of the nature
of the evidence, the Old Persian calendar will be considered together with that
of Elam (the region lying between Mesopotamia and Persia).
(^2) The Seleucid calendar was not universally adopted in Ionia (western Asia Minor), but it
seems at least to have been the official calendar of Sardis: Samuel (1972) 132 (see also 125–6, on
Pergamum).
(^3) Although the main sphere of use of the Julian calendar was the western half of the Roman
Empire, it was also used, under a different nomenclature, in parts of the East such as the province
of Syria: see Ch. 5.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 169