only notable exception were the Romans, whose elaboratefastiwere displayed
in sometimes monumental, public, and private inscriptions. Some other
calendars are attested in fullinliterary sources, such as the Greek astronomical
calendars and the calendar rosters of theDead Sea Scrolls; but the extent to
which these sophisticated calendars were implemented in reallife remains
uncertain.Itisonlyinlate Antiquity that full-length descriptions of calendars
begin to proliferate inliterary sources, withCensorinus’DeDieNatali(third
centuryCE),Christian treatises on the date of Easter, Talmudic accounts of the
rabbinic calendar, and thelate antiquehemerologiaor tables of the calendars
of the Roman East.
In earlier Antiquity, however, we are told remarkablylittle about the
structure and workings of the calendars. The Babylonian calendar is never
described or explained in any cuneiform source, in spite of the staggering
number of astronomicaland economic cuneiform tablets that have been
recovered and that assume and use this calendar. TheHebrew Bible says
nothing about how its calendar of numbered months was reckoned. Egyptian
sources are equally reticent: the sixteenth-centuryBCEEbers papyrus, which
willbe examined inCh. 3, gives only a very partialaccount of the Egyptian
calendar; whilst the third-centuryBCEdecree ofCanopus, which calls for the
institution ofleap years in the Egyptian calendar, remains strangely unclear
about when or how the additionalday inleap years is to be added. Significant-
ly, it is an outsider, the Greek historianHerodotus, who gives us in thefifth
centuryBCEthe earliest fulldescription we have of the Egyptian calendar.
The procedures through which theflexiblecalendars of Babylon, Greece,
and Republican Rome were managed are also very poorly documented.In the
context of the Greeklunar calendars, for example, we do not know how the
new moon was sighted (if indeed it was), who made the decisions about when
to begin the month, and how these decisions were disseminated and pub-
licized.Perhaps no particular significance should be attached to the silence of
our sources, because ancient texts are generallyselective about what they
choose to describe.It is no surprise that the only ancient source, to my
knowledge, that describes in any detaila procedure of new moon sighting
and declaration of the new month is the Mishnah—for rabbinicliterature
stands out, in Antiquity, for its interest inrealiaand dailylife.
Thelack of evidence is frustrating to the modern scholar, but also an
interesting challenge.It means that in many cases, the structure of ancient
calendars must be reconstructed on the basis of inferences from dated inscrip-
tions and documents—a procedure fraught with methodologicaldifficulties.
Indeed, the major controversies that have divided modern scholars on the
calendars of Athens, for example, are due to the difficulty of drawing any
cogent conclusions from the verylarge number of Athenian dated inscriptions
(seeCh. 1 ). Modern scholars have had a tendency to extrapolate from tenuous
inferences and verylimited evidence. Thus a short comment of Tacitus about
8 Calendars in Antiquity