that this must have been the calendar employed in Berenike for official, public
purposes.^92
CyprusDated inscriptions in Cyprus from the mid-third centuryBCEuse only Mace-
donian months names; this suggests that the official (and only) calendar in
use, in this period, was the Ptolemaic Macedonian calendar. But from the mid-
second centuryBCEEgyptian civil dates begin to be attested in inscriptions
(Mitford 1961: 129–31; 1971: 74–6). It seems likely that after the assimilation
of the Ptolemaic Macedonian to the Egyptian civil calendar the mid-second
centuryBCE(see Chapter 3), the Egyptian civil calendar rose in importance and
eventually superseded its Macedonian counterpart. The Egyptian civil calen-
dar seems to have become dominant in Cyprus through the rest of the
Ptolemaic period.^93
The 364-day Judaean calendarAfixed, 364-day calendar is attested in Judaean (or‘Jewish’) literary sources
from the third–first centuriesBCE, and appears to have been designed during
the period of Ptolemaic rule. The extent to which it was used in practice is
unknown and very contentious, but it certainly occupied a position of impor-
tance in the literature and culture of Judaean Jews in this period. This calendar
was highly sophisticated, as we shall see, and represents a significant stage in
the development and rise offixed calendars in the ancient world.
The origins of this calendar are also highly contentious, but I shall argue
that it was largely inspired by the Egyptian civil calendar. Unlike the calendars
surveyed so far in this chapter, the 364-day calendar was structurally different
from the Egyptian calendar, as its year was shorter by one day; its relationship
to the Egyptian calendar is in this respect debatable. But like the Egyptian
(^92) Reynolds no. 17 is dated 25 Phaophi and the Jewish (Biblical) festival of Tabernacles. In the
late 1st c.BCE–early 1st c.CE, the Egyptian date of 25 Phaophi occurred at the end of October,
which would be compatible to the early autumn festival of Tabernacles (Stern 2001: 58–61). This
may be taken as confirmation (though not as absolute proof ) of the general assumption that the
authentic Egyptian calendar was still used in Cyrenaica in the Roman period, and not, as in
Salamis (see next n.), a modified calendar with Egyptian month-names.
(^93) At the end of the Ptolemaic period, it is attested e.g. in an inscription from Kourion dated
34 BCE(Thonemann 2008). Egyptian month-names were still in use in Salamis (eastern Cyprus)
in the Roman period and late Antiquity, still with a calendar structure of twelve 30-day months
andfive epagomenal days; but in other respects, the calendar had parted ways from the Egyptian
(or Alexandrian) calendar (Jerphanion 1932, Mitford 1961: 118–19, Stern 2010a). As we shall see
in Ch. 5, these changes are likely to have been made in the early Roman period.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 193