Re: [tied] Ancient Egyptian calendar problems

The Islamic calendar is lunar. I.e. each month starts with the new moon, and there are 12 months in the year. So, the Islamic year is some 10 or 11 days shorter than ours. And you're right. Because of this the feasts move around our calendar. Last year the Eid-al-Fitr, the feast at the end of the fasting month of Ramadhan occurred just after New Year. This year it will occur at Christmas time.

As for the Egyptians, I thought they had intercalary days or months, and several different calendars. I can't remember now, and there' all awful lot of junk written about the accuracy or lack thereof of Egyptian astronomy.

Cheers

Dennis

----- Original Message -----

From: Håkan Lindgren

To: Cybalist

Sent: Monday, 28 August, 2000 4:36 PM

Subject: [tied] Ancient Egyptian calendar problems

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