2
The Babylonian Calendar
Sources from Mesopotamia and the Levant of the third and second millennia
BCEreveal the existence of numerous calendars, all lunar but different, and
exerting a complex nexus of influences over one another.^1 But in the course of
the second millenniumBCEa standard sequence of months became dominant
in Babylonia, and later spread to the whole of Mesopotamia. By 1100BCEthe
Assyrian kingdom (in northern Mesopotamia) had adopted it as its own
calendar.^2 In thefirst millenniumBCEthe westward imperial expansion of
Mesopotamian kingdoms, and in particular the formation of the Persian
Achaemenid Empire, led further to the diffusion of the standard Babylonian
calendar throughout the Near and Middle East. This was largely, but
not solely, the result of its use as official calendar by the neo-Assyrian and
neo-Babylonian empires, later continued under the Achaemenids and the
Seleucids.
The diffusion of the standard Babylonian calendar in the Levant is evident
already in the late second millenniumBCE, when scribes in Ugarit or H:ana, in
western Syria, appear to have known it and sometimes used it (Cohen 1993:
380 – 1). A little later, in the seventh–sixth centuriesBCE, the calendar is
found again in Neirab (northern Syria).^3 But the expansion of the standard
Babylonian calendar reached its highest extent in the Achaemenid Empire
(^1) On the early origins of the Mesopotamian lunar (or‘lunisolar’) calendars, see Brack-
Bernsen (2007). 2
The most detailed studies of Old Babylonian month-names are Greengus (1987, 2001); see
also Cohen (1993) 297–305, Bickerman (1968) 21, 24. Greengus shows that the standard
Nisannu sequence did not emerge until the Middle Babylonian period (early second millenni-
um), perhaps in the city of Babylon (1987: 228–9); whereas Cohen loc. cit. and Britton (2007)
115 – 16 reiterate the traditional view that the standard sequence originated in the city of Nippur.
See also Cohen (1993) 302–3, 330–1 on the Elamite derivation of the Babylonian month-names
Shabatu and Addaru, and the possible Old Persian derivation of Arah:samnu (whereas Hartner
1979: 744–6 and Hallock 1969: 74 n. 11 suggested on the contrary, but with reservations, that the
Old Persian name was derived from the Babylonian calendar).
(^3) Dhorme (1928). These tablets, however, are Babylonian and refer sometimes to transactions
carried out in Babylon; they do not prove that the Babylonian calendar was adopted in Syria by
the local population.