Calendars were at the heart of ancient culture and society and were far more than just technical, time-keeping devices. Calendars in Antiquity offers a comprehensive study of the calendars of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, from the origins up to and including Jewish and Christian calendars in late Antiquity.

Dates form the backbone of written history. But where do these dates come from? Many different calendars were used in the ancient world. Some of these calendars were based upon observations or calculations of regular astronomical phenomena, such as the first sighting of the new moon crescent that defined the beginning of the month in many calendars, while others incorporated schematic simplifications of these phenomena, such as the 360-day year used in early Mesopotamian administrative practices in order to simplify accounting procedures. Historians frequently use handbooks and tables for converting dates in ancient calendars into the familiar BC/AD calendar that we use today. But very few historians understand how these tables have come about, or what assumptions have been made in their construction. The seven papers in this volume provide an answer to the question what do we know about the operation of calendars in the ancient world, and just as importantly how do we know it? Topics covered include the ancient and modern history of the Egyptian 365-day calendar, astronomical and administrative calendars in ancient Mesopotamia, and the development of astronomical calendars in ancient Greece. This book will be of interest to ancient historians, historians of science, astronomers who use early astronomical records, and anyone with an interest in calendars and their development.

Calendars in the Making investigates the Roman and medieval origins of several calendars we are most familiar with today, including the Christian liturgical calendar, the Islamic calendar, and the week as a standard method of dating and time reckoning.

Calendar and Community traces the development of the Jewish calendar from its origins until it reached, in the tenth century CE, its present form. Drawing on a wide range of often neglected sources - literary, documentary, epigraphic, Jewish, Graeco-Roman and Christian - it is the first comprehensive work to have been written on the subject.It will be useful not only to historians and epigraphists for the interpretation of early Jewish datings, but also as a historical study of early Judaism in its own right. Its main theme is that the Jewish calendar evolved in the course of this period from considerable diversity (with a variety of solar and lunar calendars) to unity (with the normative rabbinic calendar). The unification of the calendar was one element in the unification of Jewish identity in later antiquity and the earlymedieval world.

Because they list all the public holidays and pagan festivals of the age, calendars provide unique insights into the culture and everyday life of ancient Rome. The Codex-Calendar of 354 miraculously survived the Fall of Rome. Although it was subsequently lost, the copies made in the Renaissance remain invaluable documents of Roman society and religion in the years between Constantine's conversion and the fall of the Western Empire. In this richly illustrated book, Michele Renee Salzman establishes that the traditions of Roman art and literature were still very much alive in the mid-fourth century. Going beyond this analysis of precedents and genre, Salzman also studies the Calendar of 354 as a reflection of the world that produced and used it. Her work reveals the continuing importance of pagan festivals and cults in the Christian era and highlights the rise of a respectable aristocratic Christianity that combined pagan and Christian practices. Salzman stresses the key role of the Christian emperors and imperial institutions in supporting pagan rituals. Such policies of accomodation and assimilation resulted in a gradual and relatively peaceful transformation of Rome from a pagan to a Christian capital.

The smooth functioning of an ordered society depends on the possession of a means of regularising its activities over time. That means is a calendar, and its regularity is a function of how well it models the more or less regular movements of the celestial bodies - of the moon, the sun or the stars. Greek and Roman Calendars examines the ancient calendar as just such a time-piece, whose elements are readily described in astronomical and mathematical terms. The story of these calendars is one of a continuous struggle to maintain a correspondence with the regularity of the seasons and the sun, despite the fact that the calendars were usually based on the irregular moon. But on another, more human level, Greek and Roman Calendars steps beyond the merely mathematical and studies the calendar as a social instrument, which people used to organise their activities. It sets the calendars of the Greeks and Romans on a stage occupied by real people, who developed and lived with these time-pieces for a variety of purposes - agricultural, religious, political and economic.This is also a story of intersecting cultures, of Greeks with Greeks, of Greeks with Persians and Egyptians, and of Greeks with Romans, in which various calendaric traditions clashed or compromised.

This book provides a definitive account of the history of the Roman calendar, offering new reconstructions of its development that demand serious revisions to previous accounts. Examines the critical stages of the technical, political, and religious history of the Roman calendar Provides a comprehensive historical and social contextualization of ancient calendars and chronicles Highlights the unique characteristics which are still visible in the most dominant modern global calendar

The focus of this book is the interplay between ancient astronomy, meteorology, physics and calendrics. It looks at a set of popular instruments and texts (parapegmata) used in antiquity for astronomical weather prediction and the regulation of day-to-day life. Farmers, doctors, sailors and others needed to know when the heavens were conducive to various activities, and they developed a set of fairly sophisticated tools and texts for tracking temporal, astronomical and weather cycles. Sources are presented in full, with an accompanying translation. A comprehensive analysis explores questions such as: What methodologies were used in developing the science of astrometeorology? What kinds of instruments were employed and how did these change over time? How was the material collected and passed on? How did practices and theories differ in the different cultural contexts of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome?

The recent large-scale watershed projects in northern Syria, where the ancient city of Emar was located, have brought this area to light, thanks to salvage operation excavations before the area was submerged. Excavations at Meskeneh-Qadimeh on the great bend of the Euphrates River revealed this large town, which had been built in the late 14th century and then destroyed violently at the beginning of the 12th, at the end of the Bronze Age. In the town of Emar, ritual tablets were discovered in a temple that are demonstrated to have been recorded by the supervisor of the local cult, who was called the “diviner.” This religious leader also operated a significant writing center, which focused on both administering local ritual and fostering competence in Mesopotamian lore. An archaic local calendar can be distinguished from other calendars in use at Emar, both foreign and local. A second, overlapping calendar emanated from the palace and represented a rising political force in some tension with rooted local institutions. The archaic local calendar can be partially reconstructed from one ritual text that outlines the rites performed during a period of six months. The main public rite of Emar’s religious calendar was the zukru festival. This event was celebrated in a simplified annual ritual and in a more elaborate version of the ritual for seven days during every seventh year, probably serving as a pledge of loyalty to the chief god, Dagan. The Emar ritual calendar was native, in spite of various levels of outside influence, and thus offers important evidence for ancient Syrian culture. These texts are thus important for ancient Near Eastern cultic and ritual studies. Fleming’s comprehensive study lays the basic groundwork for all future study of the ritual and makes a major contribution to the study of ancient Syria.