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The names of the days of the month vary somewhat over time. There are also several possible names for a given name, since the Egyptians were concerned with different manifestations of the same deity under different circumstances. Table 9.9 is from Heinrich Brugsch's four-volume Thesaurus Inscriptionum Aegyptiacarum (pp. 4648). |
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The Egyptians did not use a time unit larger than one year for counting purposes. As a consequence, they did not date years by eras in the modern sense. In the earliest times, years were reckoned by important events. A victory over an enemy might be recorded as ''The year of the first smiting of the east." Later, by the time of the fifth dynasty, the biennial census of cattle was used for reckoning years, and a regnal system was attached, so that years were reckoned as "The year after the third census." Later, years were simply numbered sequentially within the reign of a ruler, in a true regnal system. |
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9.2.1.3
The Civil Calendar |
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For many purposes, the civil calendar is the Egyptian calendar. Egyptologists fastened upon this calendar to begin their squabbles, so the bulk of the false starts in Egyptian calendrics is also concerned with this calendar. |
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9.2.1.3.1
Historical Background |
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The general theory of the civil calendar states that the Egyptians determined the length of the year to be 365 days, dividing the days into three seasons of four months and five epagomenal days. It further states that the heliacal rising of Sirius marked the start of the new year at the beginning of the calendar. |
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Because this rising occurs every 365.25 days, however, the civil year would, after four years, begin on the day before the New Year, and would migrate backward through the calendar at a rate of one day every four years. After (4365 =) 1,460 such years, it would return to its original point, such a period being called a Sothic cycle. Eduard Meyer, in his Aegyptische Chronologie (Berlin, 1904) calculated that one such coincidence between Sothic rising and start of New Year occurred on 19 July 27812778 B.C. The calendar was demonstrably in use before that date, so Meyer backed up 1,460 years to 19 July 4241 B.C. and claimed that day as the first certain date in history. Breasted endorsed this view, which became dogma. (See, e.g., Breasted's A History of Egypt [p. 10], which notes the introduction of the 365-day calendar in 4241 B.C., marking the "earliest fixed date in the history of the world".) |
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This position eventually came under increasing attack, however. Some scholars, at least, have since come around to the view that the calendar in use during the proto-dynastic period was the early lunar calendar. The Egyptians, in this view, could easily have determined the length of a schematic year either by using Sirius, which they were accustomed to do already, or by averaging the number of days over several lunar years. Either method would have yielded 365 as an integral number of days. |
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