In Asia Minor, it is more difficult to identify discrepancies of this kind,
because most calendars had month-names that are unidentifiable with Mace-
donian or Babylonian months. In Lycia, however, where Macedonian month-
names were used, the discrepancy between the local and Seleucid calendar
may have been as much as three months, with Dios occurring in the month of
January, which would suggest again that three excessive intercalations had
been made.^58
In this light, it cannot be assumed that the Seleucid Macedonian and
Babylonian calendars with their rigid 19-year cycle of intercalations were
consistently observed in any post-Seleucid state, even if there is evidence, in
some years, of calendrical conformity. Thus in 8BCE, when a new calendar was
instituted in the Roman province of Asia, the month of Peritios—in those
cities of the province that used Macedonian month-names—began on
10 January (see below,}3), a date which is compatible with the Seleucid
Macedonian–Babylonian calendar; however, this does not prove that these
cities were dependent on this calendar or followed it consistently. In 8BCE,
indeed, the Seleucid kingdom was no longer in existence, and the province of
Asia (on the western coast of Asia Minor) is unlikely to have had any contacts
with distant Babylonia; unless the cities of Asia were committed to the
perpetuation of the 19-year cycle—for which there is no positive evidence—
compatibility to the Seleucid, Macedonian-Babylonian calendar in 8BCEcould
have been purely fortuitous.
Similarly, the calendar of Judaea shows conformity to the Babylonian
calendar in the years 130BCE,37CE, and 66CE;^59 but continuous conformity
to the Babylonian calendar cannot necessarily be extrapolated from these three
dates. In 130BCE, when Judaea had only recently become independent from
the Seleucid Empire and the Hasmonaean ethnarch, John Hyrcanus, was
still campaigning alongside Antiochus VII Sidetes against the Parthians in
Adiabene—whilst the Seleucid king himself had only lost Babylonia to the
Parthians some eleven years earlier—it is natural to expect that both Judaean
and Seleucid rulers still followed the Babylonian cycle of intercalations. But in
thefirst centuryCE, compatibility of the Judaean calendar to the Babylonian
years. In the case of Sidon, however, the evidence is not completely conclusive, as it is possible
that the calendar was arranged to make the Macedonian New Year (1 Dios) coincide with the
Julian New Year in January, without any indication of when (lunar) Dios occurred at the point
when the calendar was Julianized.
(^58) As in Sidon, Dios of the Julianized calendar of Lycia was assimilated to January (ibid.).
Lycia was independent from the Seleucid Empire already in 139/8BCE(Schürer 1973–87: i. 194– 5
and n. 16, iii(1). 4 n. 2, based on 1 Macc. 15: 22–3), which could explain how a large, three-month
discrepancy from the Seleucid-Babylonian calendar had built up by the end of the 1st c.BCE.
However, the same reservations as with Sidon apply here (see previous n.).
(^59) With thefirst month of the year beginning on or after the vernal equinox: see evidence and
discussion in Stern (2001) 55–7, 61–2, 114–15, 121–2.
252 Calendars in Antiquity