period. This early dating needs further discussion. It seems likely that the
Persian Zoroastrian calendar was instituted before the reform of the Egyp-
tian calendar under Augustus (in the 20s BCE; see Chapter 5), because
otherwise it would most probably have been modelled on the reformed,
Alexandrian calendar, with a leap year every four years. Referring to events
in 333BCE, Quintus Curtius Rufus (3. 3. 10;first centuryCE) mentions that
the Persians have a 365-day year; but this may just be a first-century
anachronism. Some have attempted to argue on linguistic grounds that
the Persian Zoroastrian calendar could only have been established in the
Parthian period, i.e. from the second centuryBCE. The basis of this argu-
ment is that had this calendar been established earlier, it would have been
given month-names in either Old Persian or late Avestan;^33 but since a
number of the Zoroastrian month-names are clearly not Old Persian, and
none of the names are Avestan, by default they can only be identified as
Parthian (Lecoq 1997: 174). This argument, however, is not particularly
strong, as month-names could easily have changed at a later stage. More-
over, although none of the Zoroastrian month-names are Avestan, their
derivation from Avestan is in most cases clear.
On historical grounds, moreover, Parthian origins are completely implau-
sible, because there never were political, commercial, or cultural contacts of
any importance between the Parthian kingdom and Egypt. There is no reason
why the Parthians should have adopted the calendar of a distant kingdom with
which it barely had any relations. The only period when Persia was associated
with Egypt (politically, and hence also perhaps in other ways) was under the
Achaemenids, more precisely from the time of Cambyses’conquest of Egypt
(c.525BCE) to the dissolution of the Empire and the separation of the Ptole-
maic and Seleucid kingdoms after Alexander’s death (late fourth centuryBCE)
or earlier, to the latefifth centuryBCE, after which Egypt becomede facto
independent from Achaemenid rule;^34 it is only within this period that the
Egyptian calendar is likely to have been introduced.
On purely calendrical grounds, the early Achaemenid period should be
preferred because, as mentioned above, it is only then that Farwardīn (month I)
coincided with the spring equinox, the traditional Persian New Year. Had the
calendar been instituted later, the position of Farwardīn would not be possible,
on any account, to explain. De Blois (1996) 49 works out that the beginning of
Farwardīn coincided exactly with the spring equinox in the years 481– 479 BCE,
(^33) The language of the ancient body of literature calledAvesta, identified as Eastern Iranian.
(^34) In the last century of the Achaemenid empire (i.e. late 5th–late 4th cc.), for most of the time
Egypt wasde factoindependent from Achaemenid rule; it is thus perhaps less likely that the
Egyptian calendar was borrowed by the Persians in this later period. Boyce (1975–91: ii. 144–5,
243 – 5) dates the institution of the Persian Zoroastrian calendar to the reign of Artaxerxes II, but
with the only justification that this is when evidence of the Old Persian calendar ceases. Actually,
it ceases already in the mid-5th c.BCE.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 177