Calendar, Greek

The Author provides a thorough introduction to the five (5) most commonly used calendars in Ancient Athens through the Roman Period. This paper presents an outline of each calendar as well as a detailed example of converting an example to its Julian equivalent. This draft includes an added paragraph that permits coversions to Gregorian Calendar dates (as well as minor grammatical and bibliographic corrections)

Athenian Year Primer Vol II, 2024

UPDATED 23 Jun 2024: Chapter excerpt from the forthcoming Athenian Year Primer Vol. II. The excerpt presupposes familiarity with the methodologies and arguments presented in AYP. The underlying premise when seeking to unlock the Calendars of Ancient Athens must presuppose they remained seasonally aligned. The present analysis seeks to uncover what this actually means. As such, it sets the stages further analyses of Thoukydides and ancient Attic Festivals.

The Athenian Year Primer, Volume II (Under Development), 2022

DRAFT: Work in Progress - to be included in the second volume of the Athe Athenian Year Primer. Analyzes various evidence from the 5th Century and applies it to the schemas put forth in The Athenian Year Primer

The Athenian Year Primer Vol II, 2023

The Placement of Embolismic Months: Chapter from the forthcoming Athenian Year Primer Vol. II. The excerpt presupposes familiarity with the methodologies and arguments presented in AYP. Chapter tackles one of the most fundamental and crucial yet least understood calendrical practices, which all lunisolar calendars must follow: insertion of an extra (thirteenth) lunar month to keep a lunar year’s Synodic Cycles aligned to a Sidereal Solar Year (i.e., solstice ↔ solstice or equinox ↔ equinox). 1) Show that ancient Greeks across the ancient Aegean proved far more astronomically savvy than currently appreciated. 2) Argue that ancient Athenians could not have used any fixed or absolute thus, in effect, arbitrarily inserted embolismic month to keep Archontic Years aligned. Significant, existential (practical) considerations existed. 3) Consequently, also argue that intercalations must have possessed “rules” or at least firmly established “guidelines.” The most obvious in fact being any number of seasonal festivals (e.g., Anthesteria, Eleusinian Mysteries). Seasonal festivals, moreover, promptly follow all Panhellenic gatherings (addressed in subsequent Chapters). 4) Attempt to unlock the methodologies used so one can not only understand the underlying math but also establish the base astronomical “template.” 5) Finally, knowing what Calendar Equations ought have occurred aids greatly when working with recovered epigraphical evidence that display such equations. When any deviations surface, we can develop a thorough understanding of why they took place.

Instruments – Observations – Theories: Studies in the History of Astronomy in Honor of James Evans, ed. Alexander Jones and Christián Carman, 2020

It is a pleasure to be able to offer a paper to our honorand. Many years ago James Evans established himself as a great teacher of the history of ancient Greek astronomy to many beyond the confines of his own lecture room through his book, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy. While in more recent years he has provided us with sophisticated papers on the more technical aspects of astronomy, especially as they pertain to the Antikythera Mechanism, it is to that earlier monograph, and its impact on myself and my own students, that I wish to pay homage in this small offering on ancient "observational" astronomy.

The mythical narrative of Apollo's northern voyage and the place of his festivals in several Greek calendars, reflected also in local ritual practice, seems to reflect certain elements in his nature best explained through his association with the sun, more precisely, the annual solar movement. The association was noted long ago, but a selective analysis will show that both the narrative and the ritual reflect the model of annual solar motion expressed in terms of a suspended reference, a mythical metaphor, a linear narrative defined both by the very nature of language and the celestial phenomenon it is describing. The analysis of various Greek calendars supports the notion of the solstices as the most important defining moments in the annual solar motion, and their connection with Apollo reflects precisely this fact.

The word "Calendar" and the Ancient Greek epigraphic evidence Modern dictionary descriptions of the word hemerologion in Greek, or Calendar / calendrier / Kalender in other west european languages, refer to a written text, as well as to the act of calculating both days/months and years, which points out that the semantics of all these modern words contain not only circular, but also linear time (Kravaritou 2007). However, Ancient Greek written tradition used completely different terms, in order to describe the linear -Historia (History), Chronon anagraphe (Register of the years), etc.-and the circular time -periodos (period), kuklos (circle), hetos (year), eniautos (repetitive period of time)-respectively (Darbo-Peschanski 2000, 89-114; Kravaritou 2006, 24-33). Furthermore, Ancient Greeks never used a specific term to describe their annual religious time, or the totality of their annual festivals Kravaritou 2006, 39-44). We assume that they were never interested in doing so, since they made no use of a specific book or written text for this purpose. A detailed study of both the form and content of the

When Thucydides began to write his epic The History of the Peloponnesian War, he found he had a problem with time. Not that he did not have plenty of it, being an exile with nothing else to do, but he lacked the means to describe its passing. In the modern West, this is straightforward. The years count from an exact date, which was originally (and inaccurately) believed to be when Christ was born. Each year starts on 1 January and, in every Western culture, months have a consistent number of days, with weekends arriving reliably on the sixth day of the week. Thursday, Donnerstag and giovedì are all the same day and happen at the same time of the same month. Ancient Greece could not have been more different. Everyone's years started counting from a different date, be it from the founding of the city, a legendary event or the rule of a particularly distinguished individual. Years were named for individual leaders, such as kings or archons, and were different from city to city. Nor did the year start at the same time. Some states liked the idea of starting a year with the autumn equinox, while others started six months later in the spring. Some kicked the year off at the time of a particular religious festival (though no one seems to have chosen the bizarre and arbitrary time of some ten days a er the winter solstice, since where would be the sense in that?). Once the year had begun, whenever it began, the months were not only equally arbitrary but also flexible. If the city fathers decided that the civic calendar was a bit packed in one month, they might extend it by ten days or so, and steal days off other months to compensate. Since no sane landlord would rent a building on those terms, rents tended to be paid according to lunar months, so that in Athens alone there were competing calendars, including the lunar, the religious, the civic and the solar.

The requirements of time reckoning and demands on maintaining the mechanisms of constructing the cycles of Anno Domini and of the Easter celebrations required considerable attention from early medieval scholars. In light of the new discoveries, the extent of their innovation needs to be investigated against the considerable reassessment of the importance of calendar and astronomical observation for Near Eastern cultures. For the Babylonians, it was shown, had already been able to create cognitive mechanisms and procedures that were necessary to create a linear calendar out of the disjointed cycles they were able to observe by looking at the Moon and some other celestial bodies. The Greeks, however, passed on this problem as Aristarchus of Samos and Ptolemy, since they sought to create a geometrical, visual utopia. The cyclical character of time and the ways to construct a linear calendar were lost on them since they used many calendars in their own life that could be reconciled only within the Large Year of 19 years, the lunar cycle. It was Christianity, which, relying on the Old Testament narratives that borrowed from the traditions of Near Eastern, Babylonian astronomy, that began to struggle against visual pseudo-simplicity and sought to establish its calendar and in fact the dogma on that initial cyclical character that was common to both Babylonian sources and the Old Testament. Alexandria was in all cases the key transfer point and the place of synthesis. So Christianity's representation of time reached the Mediterranean in this strange roundabout way, by way of the school of Alexandria's interpretations. The key was the calendar that was centered on the events surrounding the Easter just because it required the adherents of the new religion to agree on the key event of the conjunction of the Solar and Lunar calendars and their restart (symbolized by the "Resurrection"). This originated in the fact that the key point of the calendar, the beginning of the cycle and the year, cannot be determined astronomical and so it is the matter of faith. And so unlike the Greeks, the Christians sought to reconstruct the Mesopotamian knowledge about the cycles of time, heavily represented in the Old Testament, as a principle of theology. Early Medieval scholars in this context can be understood better because they did struggle for maintaining the calendar cyclical and precision was subject to this principle. They also well understood that the beginning of the calendar is a consensual, goodwill act that requires a community's joint action and agreement.

EIRENE, 2015

In introducing this subject it is necessary to give the definitions of the key words kernos and calendar which are at the core of this paper. The current definition of kernos (plural kernoi) is that it is a pottery ring or stone tray in which several cups for holding offerings are carved. A calendar is a managing time system by which the beginning, the length, and the division of a time period (e.g. 365 days) are fixed and by which days and longer divisions of time (weeks, months and years) are arranged in a definite order. The calendars that have been used by humanity so far are the lunar, the lunisolar and the solar. In this paper it will be proved for the first time worldwide that around 1800 BCE the Minoans used stone kernoi as calendars which counted the 365 days of a solar year as follows: 3 days for celebrations (at the beginning of the year) + 5 months (of 36 days per month) + 2 days for celebrations (at the middle of the year) + 5 months (of 36 days per month).