eastern sector of the Empire, as the Babylonian Macedonian calendar became
the dominant calendar of the Seleucid rulers (Bickerman 1983).We thusfind a
list of Macedonian month-names in a second-centuryBCEinscription from
Armawir (Armenia),^72 the Macedonian month of Gorpiaios in third-century
BCEIran (Samuel 1972: 144), the Macedonian month of Oloios (i.e. Loios) in
early second-centuryBCEBactria (Rea, Senior, and Hollis 1994), the Babylo-
nian month of Elul in a mid-third-centuryBCEinscription from Afghanistan
(then part of the Mauryan Indian empire),^73 and then numerous Babylonian
and Macedonian month-names (alongside Indian month-names) in epigraph-
ic sources from Gandhara (eastern Afghanistan) dating all the way to the
second centuryCE.^74 In this period, the new Persian calendar may have
become identified as primarily Zoroastrian; and it is perhaps mainly through
the medium of Zoroastrianism that the calendar survived, until its apparent
revival as an official, imperial calendar under the Sasanians in the third
centuryCE.
Why the Egyptian calendar?It remains to be asked why the Achaemenid rulers chose, for the purpose of
this policy, the calendar of what must have been to them a distant and quite
alien civilization. Its adoption in Persia and other regions even more remote
from Egypt is indeed bizarre and in need of explanation.
Some have suggested that the old Avestan Iranian calendar was not lunar
but similar to the Egyptian calendar, which would explain why the latter might
have been eventually adopted. According to this theory, the old Avestan
calendar consisted of a 360-day year, or twelve 30-day months (but without
the addition of epagomenal days). The only basis for this theory consists of
parallels between the seasonal division of the year in the Avesta and in ancient
Indian Vedic sources, and of references in the latter to a 360-day year (the
sāvanayear).^75 These parallels, however, are flimsy and do not warrant
the assumption that Iranian and Indian calendars were identical. Indeed, if
(^72) Even though Armenia had already become independent from the Seleucid Empire,c.190
BCE 73 : Russell (1987) 57–8.
Aramaic inscription Laghmān II: Boyce (1975–91) iii. 145.
(^74) Chakravarty (1975) 22; Falk and Bennett (2009) esp. 204–5, 211.
(^75) This theory is defended by Boyce (1970) 515, (1975–91) i. 171–4, (2005); for a more
balanced view, see Hartner (1979) 8–9, (1985) 748–56, Blois (1996). The number 360 often
appears in Hellenistic sources in the context of the Persian solar cult, but this has no bearing on
the calendar (paceBriant 1996: 292–3). Al-Biruni describes a Persian 360-day calendar (Boyce
1970: 516), but his reliability is doubtful (see de Blois 2006: 48, and generally 1996). A 30-day
month is assumed inYasna16 (on which see above, n. 61), but this standard month-length could
equally belong to a lunar calendar, to a 360-day calendar, or even to the later, Zoroastrian 365-
day calendar (de Blois, ibid).
188 Calendars in Antiquity