present generation; whether the next willview it in quite the same way is a
story worth following through.
FALSE MODELS, FALSE THEORIESEarlier scholarship on ancient calendars has commonly drawn on a number of
models, theories, and assumptions thatI considerflawed, inadequate, or
anachronistic.It may be usefulto explain from the outset whyIhave avoided
them.
A frequent modelin the study of ancient calendars is that of the dual(or
multiple) calendar, which posits the coexistence of two or more calendars in
any given society, typicallya‘civil’and a‘religious’calendar. This terminology
draws its origins, atleast in part, from the designation of the ancient Egyptian
calendar ascivilis,first attested in the Latin work ofCensorinus (third century
CE). But the contrastive pairing of‘civil’with‘religious’is mostlikely the
product of early modern scholarship, and as most ancient historians would
now acknowledge, an anachronism. More importantly, the hypothesis of civil
and religious calendars—or of concurrent calendars with other,less problem-
atic designations—is in many cases not grounded on any evidence, but onlyan
awkward, purpose-made solution to apparent inconsistencies in the primary
sources.
The dualor multiplecalendar model, with or without the designations of
‘civil’and‘religious’, has been invoked by modern scholars in the context of
just about every ancient society. Thus the civilcalendar of ancient Egypt has
been conceived as running alongside a so-called‘Sothic’calendar (regulated by
the star of Sothis, i.e. Sirius—not allscholars accept this) and alunar calendar
(or even, according to some scholars, two types oflunar calendar), thelatter
reserved—significantly—for cultic purposes only.In the context of ancient
Mesopotamia, thelunar Babylonian calendar is said to have coexisted with a
schematic calendar of 30-day months which was reserved for accounting and
(later) astronomicalpurposes.In ancientIsraeland Judaea, some scholars
have argued that a civilcalendar (lunar) was used alongside a priestly, cultic
calendar of 364 days; a similar modelof‘civil’and‘religious’calendars has also
been proposed forPersia in the Achaemenid period (sixth–fourth centuries
BCE).^13 InClassicalandHellenistic Greece, the civiclunar calendars, which
were generally prone to irregularities, were used, it has been argued, in
conjunction with a regularlunar calendar (the‘kata theoncalendar’)—and
thelist of examples goes on. The pervasiveness of the dualor multiplecalendar
(^13) This theory, whichIshallnot return to, is inHartner ( 1 979) 10 – 1 4.
10 Calendars in Antiquity