Immanuelle/Ancient Egyptian Lunar Calendar in hieroglyphs
Renpet-hebu-en-heb-en-pesdjenetiu "Rnpt-ḥbw-n-ḥb-psḏntjw" "Year of celebrations of the New moon festival"
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The Ancient Egyptian Lunar Calendar [simple; en; en:draft; de] in Ancient Egypt, i.e., those among the simultaneously common Egyptian calendars, whose beginning of the month was always defined by the same moon phase, were Bound lunar calendar in all documented cases. The beginning of a calendar year should preferably be the beginning of the Nile flood. It was associated very early with the appearance of the Sothis in the night sky. Therefore, the oldest documented calendars of Egypt also choose this event to determine the beginning of the year. This is also the case with the "Sothis lunar calendar".
The beginning of the month in Egypt was always considered to be the beginning of the non-visibility of the moon before sunrise, a month ended after the Old light. Thus, the Egyptian lunar calendars differed from those of many other cultures, in which a new month usually began with the new light.
The Egyptians appear to have used a purely lunar calendar prior to the establishment of the solar civil calendar[1][2] in which each month began on the morning when the waning crescent moon could no longer be seen.[3] Until the closing of Egypt's polytheist temples under the Byzantines, the lunar calendar continued to be used as the liturgical year of various cults.[2] The lunar calendar divided the month into four weeks, reflecting each quarter of the lunar phases.[4] Because the exact time of morning considered to begin the Egyptian day remains uncertain[5] and there is no evidence that any method other than observation was used to determine the beginnings of the lunar months prior to the 4th century BC,[6] there is no sure way to reconstruct exact dates in the lunar calendar from its known dates.[5] The difference between beginning the day at the first light of dawn or at sunrise accounts for an 11–14 year shift in dated observations of the lunar cycle.[7] It remains unknown how the Egyptians dealt with obscurement by clouds when they occurred and the best current algorithms have been shown to differ from actual observation of the waning crescent moon in about one-in-five cases.[5]
Parker and others have argued for its development into an observational and then calculated lunisolar calendar[8] which used a 30 day intercalary month every two to three years to accommodate the lunar year's loss of about 11 days a year relative to the solar year and to maintain the placement of the heliacal rising of Sirius within its twelfth month.[1] No evidence for such a month, however, exists in the present historical record.[9]
A second lunar calendar is attested by a demotic astronomical papyrus[11] dating to sometime after 144 AD which outlines a lunisolar calendar operating in accordance with the Egyptian civil calendar according to a 25 year cycle.[12] The calendar seems to show its month beginning with the first visibility of the waxing crescent moon, but Parker displayed an error in the cycle of about a day in 500 years,[13] using it to show the cycle was developed to correspond with the new moon around 357BC.[14] This date places it prior to the Ptolemaic period and within the native Egyptian Dynasty XXX. Egypt's 1st Persian occupation, however, seems likely to have been its inspiration.[15] This lunisolar calendar's calculations apparently continued to be used without correction into the Roman period, even when they no longer precisely matched the observable lunar phases.[16]
The days of the lunar month — known to the Egyptians as a "temple month"[10] — were individually named and celebrated as stages in the life of the moon god, variously Thoth in the Middle Kingdom or Khonsu in the Ptolemaic era: "He ... is conceived ... on Psḏntyw; he is born on Ꜣbd; he grows old after Smdt".[17]
General consensus is that the concepts of day and (lunar) month were developed before that of the year. A day always began with sunrise in Ancient Egypt. Thus, the events underlying the daily and monthly count were always before the day or month defined by this:
The night when the moon became a new moon before sunrise was the last in month.
The Heliacale rise of Sirius always took place at the end of the year. The New Year began after that with the beginning of the month.
The events usually fell in the 12th hour of the night, whereby each night, just like the light day, always had exactly 12 hours. The length of the hours changed accordingly with the seasons.[40]
Every hour, efforts were made to keep the course of the sun going in all the sun sanctuaries with ritual praises, but at least not to let a certain, processually conceived context of meaning be torn off. This context probably lies in the regularity. In Assmann 2005 it is then also stated:
Unlike in Mesopotamia and other divination cultures, the attention directed to the cosmos was not directed to the exceptions, but to the rules. In the cyclical regularity of his processes, the divinity of the cosmos was revealed to the Egyptian.
The oldest documented mentions of lunar calendar dates are found from about 2350B.C. in the Pyramid Textsn.[42] However, the use of astronomical records is already documented under King Wadji around 2880 B.C.
Template:Annotated image Sirius, the signaler for the lunar New Year in the Sothis lunar calendar
The original lunar calendar must have been based solely on observations. In any case, these observations included those of the Heliacalen rise of the Sothis. This event was called the "opener of the Year". This name was then also used for the 12th month in the "'Sothis year"', even if the event took place only after that. The first month of the New year then began after this event with the sunrise, before which the Moon was not visible again for the first time. This results in a leap year regulation based on observations, in which a 13th month was switched on in each case. In Parker 1950, the assumption was made that this happened exactly when the following month began less than 12 days after the Wepet-renpet event. In this case, the month that began after Wepet-renpet would be an intercalary 13. Month. With such a definition, he would have ensured that the event always fell in the month of the same name.
However, evidence that the beginning of a month has been calculated has not yet been found. As a result, however, an attempt was made by a number of scientists to conclude on the basis of astronomical calculations on exact calendar dates in the proleptic en Julian Calendar. But in fact, this is not possible. Instead, errors in lunar observation must be assumed:
Algorithms for calculating the visibility of the old lightthumb rules followed and proved to be incorrect in the majority of cases. Even better, more recent predictions are wrong in about 20%, that is, in 2-3 out of 12-13 cases.
Clouds could prevent the recognizability of the new moon.
Other sources of error may stand in the way of an estimation of the historical sighting.
Although Bradley E. Schaefer also states that "the currently great uncertainties in the prediction of lunar visibility do not allow a possible astronomical solution of absolute Egyptian chronology with lunar data", this does not prevent other scientists from continuing their research in this direction. In the meantime, the optical density and suspected historical dust pollution of the air are taken into account in the estimation of the visibility of the rise of Sirius.
In addition, the fact that the position of the lunar months in the Sidereal year fluctuates due to the length of the month and the repeated activation of an intercalary, thirteenth month stands in the way of general, narrowly limited information about the position of the months of the lunar calendar relative to our Gregorian calendar. Nevertheless, a rough estimate can be given:
Seasonal location of the Egyptian months compared to Central Europe
Grafton, Anthony Thomas; et al. (1985), "Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro, Censorinus, and Others", The Classical Quarterly, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, pp. 454–465.
Krauss, Rolf; et al., eds. (2006), Ancient Egyptian Chronology, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Sect. 1, Vol. 83, Leiden: Brill.
Luft, Ulrich (2006), "Absolute Chronology in Egypt in the First Quarter of the Second Millennium BC", Egypt and the Levant, Vol. XVI, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, pp. 309–316.
Neugebauer, Otto Eduard (1939), "Die Bedeutungslosigkeit der 'Sothisperiode' für die Älteste Ägyptische Chronologie", Acta Orientalia, No. 16, pp. 169 ff. (in German)
O'Mara, Patrick F. (January 2003), "Censorinus, the Sothic Cycle, and Calendar Year One in Ancient Egypt: The Epistemological Problem", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. LXII, No. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 17–26.
Calendrica Includes the Egyptian civil calendar with years in Ptolemy's Nabonassar Era (year 1 = 747 BC) as well as the Coptic, Ethiopic, and French calendars.
Civil, ver. 4.0, is a 25kB DOS program to convert dates in the Egyptian civil calendar to the Julian or Gregorian ones
