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?

when it comes to the last line of defense of Egyptian chronology itself, neither radio carbon dating nor Assyrian chronicles are specifically Egyptian sources. The two anchors mentioned above keep the Old Kingdom securely out of the fourth millennium B.C. and Ramses II securely out of the first millennium B.C. The two anchors function as a final and firm line of defense against skeptics. Yet, it is not they that are currently presented in handbooks as the backbone of the current dating of third and second millennium B.C. Egypt. Rather, Sothic dating is.

12 Egypt is generally considered to be placed securely in time by manipulating the rare Sothic dates that have survived. A Sothic date is a date of the rising of Sirius iprt spdt) according to the Egyptian civil calendar. The two most important Sothic dates are Month 8 Day 16 of Year 7 of a king who must be Sesostris III and Month 11 Day 9 of Year 9 of Amenhotep I. The rising moves forward by one day in four years in the Egyptian civil calendar. The date of the rising therefore changes by one day every four years. Conversely, if one knows on which Egyptian day the rising fell, one can roughly infer the year. This is the basic mechanism of Sothic dating. The problem with Sothic dating is that absolute consistency of the Egyptian calendar is assumed. The assumption is that the regular one-day-in-four-years shift of the 365-day Egyptian year in relation to the solar year was never disrupted by calendar reforms. This assumption is eminently reasonable. There is no evidence to contradict it. On the other hand, the assumption is difficult to prove positively. It is therefore preferable to make Sothic dating logically dependent on the two anchors described above. In other words, confidence in the validity of Sothic dating should be derived from the two anchors and not the other way around. For example, on the basis of the Assyrian evidence, Amenhotep IV can be dated to about the fourteenth century B.C. Sothic dates are available for the reigns of Amenhotep I (Month 9) and Ramses II (Month 1 ). //Sothic dating is valid, then Amenhotep I must precede and Ramses II follow Amenhotep IV. A comparison with the king-lists and other evidence shows that this is the case. Confidence in the validity of Sothic dating, which includes an assumpl! For a survey of this type of dating, with bibliographical references, see L. Depuydt, On the Consistency of the Wandering Year as Backbone of Egyptian Chronology, JARCE 32 (1995), pp. 43-58 and Depuydt, op.cit. (note 18), pp. 167-86.