Ancient Egyptian calendar problems

From: HÃ¥kan Lindgren
Message: 3419
Date: 2000-08-28

I read an essay by an author who says that the ancient Egyptians had a
365-day calendar which caused them some trouble. Since one year is in fact
slightly longer than 365 days, their calendar started to "wander", according to him,
so that holidays which belonged in the winter occured in the summer. This
caused a lot of "anger and confusion", he writes. Is this true?
 
As far as I know, all ancient civilisations who had calendars, from South America to
Asia, were aware of this problem and had more or less accurate systems of
leap years, extra months etc. to compensate for this. They didn't know that
the Earth was orbiting the Sun, but they knew when the winter solstice was,
and were able to measure the length of one year accurately enough. All ancient
civilisations were pretty good astronomers and it seems
hard to believe that they were "forced to celebrate Christmas in the summer"
(as this guy writes).
 
But wait...  what about the Islamic calendar? If I remember correctly (I once
worked with some people from Turkey), islamic holidays, like Ramadan,
are moving around the year like this, because
of the Islamic calendar. Perhaps someone on this list could
straighten this out? I'd be grateful for any information about how Egypt and
other ancient civilisations handled this problem.

Hakan