modelin earlier scholarship does not confirm its historicalplausibility; it is
rather indicative of a modern scholarly trend, with needs to be treated with
suspicion.
This is not to say that dualor multiplecalendars had no place at allin the
ancient world.Close interaction between different communities often entailed
the simultaneous use of different calendars by the same people, sometimes
with the additionalcomplication of sharing the same or similar month names:
this was common, in particular, among the cities and islands of ancient
Greece.In the second-centuryCEprovince of Arabia (and probablyalso in
other parts of the Roman Near East), Aramaic-or Nabataean-speaking Jews
were simultaneously using the structurally very different Jewish calendar
(lunar) and the officialcalendar of the Roman province (based on the
Julian calendar, and thus solar), with exactly the same month names for
both calendars. More generally, the adaptation oflocallunar calendars to
the Julian calendar in the early Roman Near Eastled for a while to the
simultaneous use of old and new calendars, as is evident atleast in Josephus’
writings (for Judaea) and in Roman Egypt.^14 But dualor multiplecalendar use
did not have to be the result of externalinterference or interaction with other
cultures.In some cases, the concurrent use of severalcalendars developed on a
purelylocal, indigenouslevel: in Athens, for example, thelunar calendar called
‘archontic’or ‘festival’calendar was used alongside an entirely different,
schematic calendar commonlycalled‘prytanic’, which is wellattested in
double-dated inscriptions and inliterary sources.
Firm evidence of dualor multiplecalendar use remains, however, unusual.
The evidence in Athens of archontic and prytanic calendars is somewhat
exceptional, as in most other cases, double-dated documents do not convinc-
ingly prove the existence of two independent, fully formed calendars. AsIshall
argue, for example, in the cases of the alleged‘lunar calendar’in Egypt and
‘kata theoncalendar’in Greece, the second dates in double-dated documents
do not presuppose a continuous calendar that was reckoned consistently and
independently from thefirst. Evenless conclusive is the evidence of inconsis-
tent dates in the primary sources, which can often be errors or explainablein
other, more convincing ways than on the basis of a dualcalendar model. The
dualor multiplecalendar model, indeed, can often create more problems than
it solves.Proponents of dualcalendar models are often forced to assume, for
example, that the same month names were used for both calendars, for the
only reason that no other month names are attested in the sources (this
applies, for example, to the Sothic andlunar calendars of Egypt, and the
schematic calendar of Babylon). The use of identicalmonth names for two
(^14) On multiplecalendar use within the province of Arabia, see Stern (200 1 )38–42; on
calendar confusion in Josephus’writings, ibid. 34–8 and below,Ch. 5 , near n. 7 5 ; on Egypt,
see ibid. n. 8 1.
Introduction 11