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?

The third step is a conclusion that naturally follows from these two assumptions. When the calendar was created in the early third millennium B.C., New Year's Day fell in the summer. That is roughly the time of year when the inundation began and when Sirius rose for the first time. So far, the first three steps of the argument have produced a temporal coincidence. The fourth step is yet another assumption, namely that the inundation or the rising or both played a role in the creation of the calendar. This assumption cannot be proven. But the afore-mentioned striking temporal coincidence makes such an assumption attractive. Several variations are thinkable. None are provable. No report about what happened survives. Two main variations of great simplicity are as follows. First, the calendar-maker(s) waited for the beginning of the inundation, presumably as the beginning of a new agricultural cycle, to begin the first 365-day year. The wandering motion of the civil year in relation to the solar year would not have been noticed for many years because the beginning of the inundation varies widely in date. The second variation is that the calendar-maker(s) waited for the day on which Sirius first rose. They were presumably already familiar with the rising as a yearly event. In this case, they would notice already after a few years that the rising began to move away from new year. The fifth step is a search for anything that might favor one or the other variation. One argument that is often cited in favor of some kind of association between the inundation and the beginning of the calendar is lexical and semantic. The verbs ßhy and wihy apparently mean "become flooded".

15 The season name íht may therefore well mean "inundation (of the Nile)." Even if iht means "inundation" and the calendar began in the inundation season, this still does not mean that the calendar-makers consciously waited for the inundation season. They had to begin somewhere. All that we can say with some certainty, with Neugebauer,"' is that, if Iht means "inundation," "die 'Überschwemmungsjahreszeit' zur tatsächlichen Überschwemmung gepaßt haben muß." There are also facts that point to an association of the calendar's origin with the rising of Sirius. These facts are tantalizing. But again, they are not binding. For example, the rising is often called wp rnpt "opener of the year".

17 But then, the rising needs no more to deserve this title than to be perl< Wb. I, pp. 33 and 258-59. "' Neugebauer, op. cit. (note 8), p. 193. 17 RA. Parker, The Calendars of Ancient Egypt, SAOC 26, Chicago 1950, pp. 33-34 §§ 164-71.