(sixth–fourth centuriesBCE). In this period, the Babylonian calendar was used
as official imperial calendar by Persian satraps and administrators as far as
Bactria (northern Afghanistan) in the east; in the west, the Babylonian calen-
dar was used in Judaea (as found in the post-exilic biblical books of Zechariah,
Ezra, and Nehemiah), further to the west in Asia Minor (in Xanthos in Lycia,
and Sardis in Lydia), as well as in Egypt, as far south as Elephantine.^4 After
Alexander’s conquest (in the late fourth century), the Macedonian calendar
was introduced to the Near East by the early Hellenistic rulers; but it was
sufficiently close to the Babylonian calendar to be assimilated to it, so that the
Babylonian calendar was appropriated by the Hellenistic dynasty of the
Seleucids, who translated its month-names into Macedonian equivalents.
This calendar, or something similar to it, then survived the disintegration of
the Seleucid Empire (around the second centuryBCE): it was used not only by
the Parthians in Babylonia, but also by smaller kingdoms, such as the Naba-
taeans in Arabia and the Hasmonaeans in Judaea, and city states such as the
coast-line cities of Sidon, Tyre, and Ascalon. As a result, by the time the
Romans arrived in thefirst centuryBCE, all or most calendars of the Near East
were Babylonian, or at least, closely derived from the Babylonian calendar.^5
Thus wefind, starting from the second millenniumBCEand culminating in
the latefirst millenniumBCE, a movement towards unification of Near Eastern
lunar calendars. In this respect, the Near East differed radically from Greece,
where as we have seen (Chapter 1), extreme diversity of lunar calendars
maintained itself in city states and islands until the Roman period. This
contrast reflects perhaps a fundamental difference of political attitudes, agen-
da, and policies in Greece and in the Near East. The unification of calendars in
the Near East in the second millenniumBCEwas clearly intended to serve the
administrative, and perhaps also ideological, purposes of the expansionist,
imperialist policies of the great Babylonian and Assyrian kingdoms.^6 Imperi-
alism on this scale did not exist in Greece, with the only exception—proving
the rule—of Alexander’s Macedonian empire, which ended up adopting,
predictably, the imperial Babylonian calendar of the Near East.
The contrast between Greece and Near East was also due to inherent
calendrical factors. Although both lunar, the Babylonian calendar (and so,
perhaps, other Near Eastern calendars) differed from the Greek calendars in
their regularity and relatively close conformity to the phases of the moon. As a
result, the months of all the different Near Eastern calendars began more or
(^4) Bactria: Shaked (2004) 42–5, Naveh and Shaked forthcoming. Xanthos: Dupont-Sommer
(1979), Fried (2004) 140–54. Sardis: S. A. Cook (1917), Buckler (1924) 1–4 (no. 1). Elephantine:
Stern (2000a).
(^5) This paragraph is a simplification of a rather more complex situation to be discussed in
Ch. 5.
(^6) Cohen (1993) 303–5 (but not noting the ideological implications of a single, imperial
calendar).
72 Calendars in Antiquity