Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
LEO DEPUYDT: What Is Certain about the Origin of the Egyptian Civil Calendar?
What Is Certain about the Origin of the Egyptian Civil Calendar? I n the unstoppable flow of popular accounts on ancient Egypt, the calendar is often associated with the yearly flood of the Nile and the rising of Sirius in July. Surely, what appealed more vividly to the ancient Egyptian imagination than the life-giving waters of the Nile and the night-sky filled with twinkling points of light? But what is true of the association of these two phenomena with the calendar's origin? This paper attempts to present a line of reasoning that shows what makes the association so attractive, yet not certain at all. In the history of humanity, someone somewhere sooner or later simply had to notice that the year is close to 365 days long and also put the number 365 into calendrical practice. The surviving sources leave no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were first. What is more, they were ahead of everyone else by two to three thousand years. The sole division of 365 days that is positively recognizable in the sources is one into 12 months of 30 days plus 5 added days. This calendrical structure was known already in antiquity as the civil calendar. This continuous cycle of 12 X 30 + 5 is often praised for its simplicity, as if it is a work of genius. One naturally wonders about the specific historical circumstances in which this simple structure was created, presumably in the early third millennium B.C. However, there is not a shred of evidence about these circumstances. Perhaps, logical inferences from circumstantial facts might produce a plausible reconstruction. This hope has led to various theories. One basic issue is: How was 365 arrived at? Assessing past research, Martin Nilsson 1 soberly concluded in 1943 that this issue remained a "riddle." Half a century later, the situation has not changed. In fact, the whole question of the calendar's origin still seems to be a riddle. One characteristic of past research on the calendar's origin is that there seem to be as many theories as there are students of the problem. This total discord M. P. Nilsson, Nochmals der Ursprung des ägyptischen Jahres, AcOr 19 (1943), pp. 1-6, p. 5.
