The Bright and Dark Sides of the Moon - Observations



Why Lunar Months Began a Day or so Later

in Ancient Greece than in Ancient Egypt

Leo Depuydt

Brown University

The narrow focus of this paper is to demonstrate what is stated in its title. This demonstration will consist of two discrete steps. The first step is to show that Greek lunar months did indeed begin about a day later than Egyptian lunar months. The second step is to show why they did. The broader focus will be on any possible cultural and sociological implications of the calendrical facts.

In Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BCE), the Greco-Macedonian lunar calendar and the native Egyptian lunar calendar were two of three calendars used at the same time. The third is the so-called civil calendar consisting of 12 months of 30 days plus five added days for a fixed total of 365. The calendar years of all three began on different days. Cultural and sociological facets of this coexistence of three calendars will be examined.

Remarks pertaining to other ancient lunar calendars, including the Hebrew and Babylonian calendars, will place the present comparison between the Egyptian and Greek lunar calendars in a larger context. In just about every nation of antiquity in the years BCE, the dominant calendar of daily life was lunar. Two exceptions are Rome and Egypt. In Rome, an original lunar calendar was transformed into a non-lunar calendar around the fifth century BCE. In Egypt, a marginal lunar calendar was used alongside the dominant civil calendar for religious purposes.

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Leo Depuydt has taught since 1991 in the Department of Egyptology, renamed in 2005 into the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He studied ancient languages and civilizations in Leuven (Belgium), at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in Tübingen before completing his doctoral work at Yale (Ph.D. ’90), where he also served as Senior Lector in Syriac and Coptic (1989-1991).

Among his recent work on calendars and chronology is a monograph entitled From Xerxes( Murder (465) to Arridaios( Execution (317): Updates on Achaemenid Chronology (2008) and an article 'From Twice Helix to Double Helix: A Comprehensive Model for Egyptian Calendar History' (in Journal of Egyptian History 2/2009). Among his other recent projects is a book entitled The Other Mathematics: Language and Logic in Egyptian and in General (2008), which is devoted to digitalizing the analysis of language and thought.

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