Preface
This book is intended not as a catalogue, but as a piece of social history.
Calendars are not a technical curiosity, but a fundamental aspect of social life,
an organizing principle of human experience, a constitutive component of
culture and world views. My purpose in this book is to examine the structure
of all the known calendars of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, and to
capture the social context of their largely common history.
The chapters in this book follow at once a thematic and an approximate
chronological order, except for Greece, which for various reasons I have placed
before the much earlier Babylonian and Egyptian calendars (Chapters 1–3).
My central argument, in these and subsequent chapters, is that calendars were
primarily political; their development was closely related to the political
changes that transformed the ancient world from the mid-first millennium
BCEto late Antiquity. The rise of large-scale empires in this period such as the
Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Roman Empires led to the formation of increas-
inglyfixed and standardized calendars, most notably the Persian and the
Julian calendars (Chapter 4). The break-up of the Seleucid Empire, conversely,
led to the fragmentation of calendars in the Near East (Chapter 5). In Chapter
6, I argue that the unofficial use of lunar calendars in the Roman Empire, such
as the Gallic and Jewish calendars, was a way of expressing subtle political
dissidence. In Chapter 7, I investigate the relationship between the calendar
and sectarianism, heresy, and social schism in Judaism and Christianity of late
Antiquity.
I have written this book with the general reader in mind, avoiding as far as
possible excessive technical detail. Not everyone will be familiar with all these
areas and periods of history. Some readers may restrict themselves to their
own areas of interest or specialization; but the Conclusion, which sums up the
argument of the whole book, is meant for all to read.
Ifirst conceived this book in 2003, during a period of research leave funded
by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now AHRC); but because of
professional distractions, it has taken many years to complete. I wish to
acknowledge the personal assistance that many friends and colleagues have
given me in areas that often lay beyond my expertise. The following read
earlier versions of chapters or parts of chapters, and contributed insightful,
informative, and critical remarks: Robert Parker (Ch. 1), Samuel Greengus,
John Steele (Ch. 2), Leo Depuydt (Ch. 3), François de Blois (Ch. 4. 1), David
Levene (Ch. 4. 3), Chris Bennett (Ch. 5 and parts of Ch. 1), Jonathan Ben-Dov
and Fergus Millar (parts of Ch. 7); and last but not least Jörg Rüpke and