Political Power and Calendar-Making in Antiquity

Abstract

Calendars in Antiquity does not rehearse the history of ever more precise data on the length of the year or the ever more practical solutions to construe systems of intercalation, which organize months, weeks, and days in a system that is able to remain in tune with the unfortunate average length of periods and the solar year. Instead, Stern offers a political history of circum-Mediterranean calendars. The monograph is driven by two theses: First, there was a trend in the history of the calendars to increase in terms of fixed periods, precise length, predictability, and thus to shift from many to one solar calendar. In the Mediterranean basin between 500 B.C.E. and 300 C.E., this macro-historical trend was embodied in many seemingly contingent micro-historical developments. One of the common features, however, and this is Stern's second thesis, was the adaption by the third millennium B.C.E. of a single historical model in the developmental paths to different empires, namely, the Egyptian solar year, established as a year of 12 × 30 + 5 days. I am less convinced by the second claim, as I will briefly argue, but will concentrate on the more important and cogent first claim.From the start, Stern takes pains to avoid a functional misunderstanding of his basic thesis. The development he traces (p. 18ff) is not a natural one, either in technical progress or in functional adaptation to growing political unities (for a system-theoretical account see my Kalender und Offentlichkeit , de Gruyter, 1995). Rather, the calendar is part of a culture's conceptualization of the world, concepts co-varying in imperial growth. From a political point of view, less regulated calendars enable the iterated demonstration of political power in ad hoc decisions on intercalation or other forms of adjusting with temporal orders (pp. 3, 15). Stern is adamant on this point and relates the long survival of flexible calendars in many Greek cities far into late antiquity to the interests of local power holders rather than to a shared cultural reaction to Roman rule (pp. 64-8).This treatment of the highly diverse Greek developments (pp. 25-70) is followed by an analysis of the Babylonian calendar and its slow shift from a sequence of months regulated by empirical observation of the moon to a system of fixed intercalations in the Achaemenid Empire (pp. 71-123). Chapter 3 (pp. 125-66) discusses interpretations of Egyptian inscriptional and literary evidence in detail. Stern persuasively argues that the evidence for local or religious calendars alongside the civic solar year only attests to discrete lunar events rather than calendars (p. …