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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.
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 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.