CALENDARS IN ANTIQUITY This page intentionally left blank Calendars in Antiquity Empires, States, and Societies SACHA STERN 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Sacha Stern 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–958944–9 Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. 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 BCE to 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- ingly fixed 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. I first 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 vi Preface Leofranc Holford-Strevens, who read and commented on the entire manu- script. An early draft of Chapter 5 was sent to Peter Derow, my former tutor, days before his unexpected demise; the late Simon Price, another former tutor, read and commented on parts of the same chapter; I dedicate it to both their memory. The book as a whole, however, is dedicated to my wife Evadne, whose share in this work has been earned through tireless support and steadfast friendship. A generous reviewer (J. M. Baumgarten 2003, himself the author of lucid studies on the Qumran calendars, who died as I was completing the last chapter of this present work) described my previous work on Jewish calendars as ‘a challenging and exciting foray into the links between the measurement of time and a millennium of Jewish social history’. I hope the same will be said of this present work: through the study of ancient calendars, a new perspective on Antiquity will have been achieved. SS London, September 2011 Contents List of Tables ix Introduction 1 PART I. FROM CITY STATES TO GREAT EMPIRES: THERISEOFTHEFIXEDCALENDARS 1. Calendars of Ancient Greece 25 2. The Babylonian Calendar 71 3. The Egyptian Calendar 125 4. The Rise of the Fixed Calendars: Persian, Ptolemaic, and Julian Calendars 167 PART II. THE EMPIRES CHALLENGED AND DISSOLVED: CALENDAR DIVERSITY AND FRAGMENTATION 5. Fragmentation: Babylonian and Julian Calendars in the Near East, Third Century BCE–Seventh Century CE 231 6. Dissidence and Subversion: Gallic, Jewish, and Other Lunar Calendars in the Roman Empire 299 7. Sectarianism and Heresy: From Qumran Calendars to Christian Easter Controversies 355 Conclusion 425 Bibliography 431 Index 455 This page intentionally left blank List of Tables 1.1 Ordinary and intercalated years at Athens, late second century BCE–second century CE 40 1.2 Ordinary and intercalated years at Athens, third century BCE 43 2.1 Intercalations in the neo-Babylonian period 101 2.2 Intercalations under Cyrus, Cambyses, and (early) Darius I 103 2.3 The Saros Canon and the optimal 19-year cycles 106 2.4 Intercalations under Darius I, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes I 108–9 2.5 Intercalations in the later Achaemenid and Seleucid periods 112–13 2.6 Babylonian intercalations in the Parthian period 116 2.7 Intercalation schemes in the Babylonian calendar 119 4.1 Republican and Julian month lengths 213 5.1 Double dates in Ptolemy’s Almagest 239 5.2 Seleucid months 240 5.3 The Syrian-Antiochene calendar 257 5.4 The Egyptian calendar in the Augustan period 266–7 5.5 The calendar months of Salamis 272 5.6 The calendar of Asia and its variants according to the hemerologia 280–1 5.7 The calendar of Heliopolis in the hemerologia 286 This page intentionally left blank Introduction ‘Since all human activities occur in time, the existence of a social system necessitates some organization of time.’1 These words, the beginning of an eminent anthropologist’s encyclopedia article on time and calendars, suggest that calendars are, above all, a necessity for the existence of society. Without dating and time-keeping devices, it wouldbeclose to impossible to coordinate political, economic, religious, and all other social activities; without calendars, society would not be able to function. This is surely correct, but only part of the story. The calendar is far more than a functional, utilitarian device for the organization of sociallife. As a shared conception of time or of the flow of human and natural events, which it assumes (for example) to be structured and recurrent, the calendar contributes to a certain perception of reality, and hence, to socially shared world views. Calendars have often been invested, indeed, with ideological meanings that transcend the temporal organization of society and assume sometimes cosmic significance. Thus in Antiquity, the calendars of ancient Egypt and of Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered) have been interpreted, each in their own way, as representations of cosmic stability and harmony. To the Babylonians, the length of calendar months and years had astrological im- plications that could affect, in turn, the welfare of the kingdom and of men. To the Jews, the procedure for declaring the new month was an act of ‘sanctifica- tion’, the fulfilment of a ‘commandment’;calendar reckoning did not just serve the practical needs of determining the dates of festivals, but constituted areligious activity in its own right. The design and reckoning of ancient calendars were often also an intellectual, scientific achievement, involving arithmetical techniques and some knowledge of astronomy. The calendar was thus, in many respects, a constitutive part of what is called ‘culture’. The calendar is often trivialized as a technical curiosity, only useful to epigraphists and ancient historians for the purpose of working out chronology 1 Goody (1968) 30; I am grateful to Stanisław Iwaniszewski for this reference. Similar thoughts were expressed already by Malinowski (1927) 203–4. See also the opening statement of Hannah (2005) 1–2, partially cited below. 2 Calendars in Antiquity and datings. The marginalization of this subject, sometimes related to a real or disingenuous phobia of numbers, is what this present work intends to rectify. Far more than a technical device, the calendar was at the heart of ancient society and culture, as an organizing principle of sociallife and as constitutive of ideologies and world views. The calendar should not be confined, as it sometimes is, to the history of science or to a marginal aspect of the history of religions.