Happy Ancient Egyptian New Year!

Painted ancient Egyptian relief of nome gods, reign of Amunhotep III (Cleveland Museum of Art, Public Domain)

Happy Ancient Egyptian New Year (give or take a few days)!

Welcome to my new blog, which is appropriately launching at the beginning of the ancient Egyptian New Year.  The ancient Egyptians divided time into years of 365 days, further subdivided into twelve thirty-day months.  Sound familiar?  The Gregorian calendar, which nearly every country in the world has adopted (with some tweaks here and there) originated in ancient Egypt.  Before we examine why late July/early August was the start of the ancient Egyptian New Year, let’s see how their calendar worked. 

Beneath the predominately cloudless skies of northeast Africa, observing the sun and the stars came naturally to the ancient Egyptians. A solar-based calendar was the obvious choice, hence the annual cycle of 365 days.  Then they divided the year into twelve months of 30 days each, and assigned four of these months to each of three seasons.  These seasons were named after the annual cycle of the Nile River and the agricultural phases along its banks: Akhet, the inundation; Peret, the time of planting and growing (literally “emergence”); and Shomu, the time of the harvest.

In the Hymn to Aten, composed around 1335 BCE, Akhenaten and Nefertiti extol their solar father:

         Your rays nurture all plants.

         As you rise, so they live;

         As they grow for you, so you make the seasons

         In order to nurture all that you make—

         the Growing Season (Peret) to cool them;

         heat that they might experience you.

- John C. Darnell and C. Darnell, Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth (New York, 2022), p. 291.

At the end of the 360 days of the three seasons, the Egyptians added a final group of five days (called “those in addition to the year” in ancient Egyptian, and “epagomenal (added to)” today, via ancient Greek).  Events were dated by regnal year of the king followed by the number of the month, the season, and the day.  The first day of the year was 1 Akhet 1, the first day of the first month of the Inundation Season.  Since the Nile flooded gradually, how did they choose which day this would be?  The observation of an astronomical event may have signaled the moment the New Year began. 

Facsimile of ancient Egyptian astronomical ceiling in the tomb of Senenmut (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain)

The Egyptians tracked the movements of the stars, and one of the most important was Sepdet, known to us (again via the ancient Greeks) as Sothis.  After seventy days of invisibility (which possibly contributed the ideal length of the mummification process), Sepdet appeared on the horizon shortly before the sun rose, a phenomenon called the heliacal rising.  Around the time of Sepdet’s appearance, the Nile River began to flood, providing the water required for Egypt’s agricultural bounty.  The rising of Sepdet not only provided a precise event for the beginning of the year, the star also embodied a rich theology of goddesses that made the event even more significant.

At the invention of the ancient civil Egyptian calendar, which may have occurred in the reign of the Third Dynasty king Djoser (ca. 2738 BCE), the heliacal rising of Sepdet was observed on 1 Akhet 1. After five years, though, the star’s rising no longer occurred on 1 Akhet 1, but a day earlier 4 Shomu 30.  Because the earth revolves around the sun in 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds, not an even 365, after decades and centuries the calendar became increasingly misaligned, not resetting for 1460 years.

Ancient Egyptian mathematics enabled architects to lay out and organize the placement of 2.3 million stone blocks (some weighing more than two tons!) with shocking precision for the Great Pyramid, the tomb of King Khufu.  And yet, a calendar that moved did not bother the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley—for official dating purposes, it could be Shomu during Akhet or Peret during Shomu.  Today, the seasons of fall, winter, spring and summer begin on either an equinox or a solstice.  Yet do you think of the start of summer as June 21st?  Similarly, as in the Hymn to Aten above, the ancient Egyptians could use the names of the seasons independently of official dates. 

Ancient Egypt is not alone in having a wandering calendar.  For example, the Hijri calendar, the Islamic lunar system, rotates through the year. The ancient Egyptians also had a lunar calendar, which ran alongside the solar calendar and was used for some festival dates.  The reason that the Gregorian calendar does not wander is because of the addition of an intercalary day every four years, Leap Day. 

Happy Ancient Egyptian New Year!