will make it even more difficult, and indeed increasingly pointless, to identify
any given calendar as essentially‘Macedonian’,‘Seleucid’,‘Babylonian’,or
‘local’. Admittedly, the complex identity of calendars was not specificto
later Antiquity: already in the second millennium BCE, the calendar that
I have called‘Babylonian’in Chapter 2 originated, as we have seen, as a hybrid
of various Mesopotamian calendrical traditions. But the Seleucid and post-
Seleucid worlds bring into focus the inherent difficulty of identifying calendars
through ethnic labels and of treating them as self-contained, monolithic
entities. The official calendar of the Seleucid Empire, when Macedonian and
Babylonian calendars were assimilated to one another, also shows that hybrid-
ity was not specific to post-imperial fragmentation (when calendars became
differentiated) but also throve in the context of the official calendars of
the great empires. It was precisely through hybridity and assimilation that
these official calendars became acceptable to all.^4
Dearth of evidence will be one of the greatest challenges in this chapter.
Information on individual calendars of the post-Seleucid and late Antique
Near East is generally scarce (with the notable exception of the Jewish calen-
dar, which will be studied in detail in the following chapters); all the more
difficult is to establish the specific circumstances and motivations that may
have led to the diversification of calendars in this period. In many cases, we
need to rely on evidence relating to the point at which the calendar under
study came to anend, being superseded by something different. Thus the
evidence will often require us to start from the end, and then extrapolate
backwards.
- THE SELEUCID CALENDAR
It is widely believed that under the Seleucids the Babylonian calendar was
retained as the official calendar of the Empire. The Seleucid calendar was
identical with the Babylonian calendar, except that in Greek documents,
equivalent Macedonian month-names were used. This effectively means that
the Macedonian calendar ceased to exist as an independent reckoning, and
was completely assimilated to the Babylonian calendar. In only one respect did
(^4) Post-colonial theory has rightly insisted that hybridity is as much a feature of colonial,
imperial societies as of the post-colonial world (see e.g. Bhabha 1994). By‘assimilation’I mean a
special type of hybridity where some elements of the hybrid compound are dominant and
subsume the others, often in a context of socio-political domination. In the Seleucid calendar,
however, the assimilation of Macedonian and Babylonian elements appears to have worked both
ways, as we shall presently see. My use of the term‘post-Seleucid’in this chapter may evoke, not
without reason, the notion of‘post-colonialism’; for an interpretation, in this context, of the
prefix‘post’, see ibid. 1–9.
234 Calendars in Antiquity