(M20) A useful clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is often
furnished by the season at which his or her festival is celebrated. Thus,
if the festival falls at the new or the full moon, there is a certain
presumption that the deity thus honoured either is the moon or at least
has lunar affinities. If the festival is held at the winter or summer
solstice, we naturally surmise that the god is the sun, or at all events
that he stands in some close relation to that luminary. Again, if the
festival coincides with the time of sowing or harvest, we are inclined to
infer that the divinity is an embodiment of the earth or of the corn.
These presumptions or inferences, taken by themselves, are by no means
conclusive; but if they happen to be confirmed by other indications, the
evidence may be regarded as fairly strong.
(M21) Unfortunately, in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a great
measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is not that the
dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that they shifted from year
to year, until after a long interval they had revolved through the whole
course of the seasons. This gradual revolution of the festal Egyptian
cycle resulted from the employment of a calendar year which neither
corresponded exactly to the solar year nor was periodically corrected by
intercalation.(46) The solar year is equivalent to about three hundred and
sixty-five and a quarter days; but the ancient Egyptians, ignoring the
quarter of a day, reckoned the year at three hundred and sixty-five days
only.(47) Thus each of their calendar years was shorter than the true
solar year by about a quarter of a day. In four years the deficiency
amounted to one whole day; in forty years it amounted to ten days; in four
hundred years it amounted to a hundred days; and so it went on increasing
until after a lapse of four times three hundred and sixty-five, or one
thousand four hundred and sixty solar years, the deficiency amounted to
three hundred and sixty-five days, or a whole Egyptian year. Hence one
thousand four hundred and sixty solar years, or their equivalent, one
thousand four hundred and sixty-one Egyptian years, formed a period or
cycle at the end of which the Egyptian festivals returned to those points
of the solar year at which they had been celebrated in the beginning.(48)
In the meantime they had been held successively on every day of the solar
year, though always on the same day of the calendar.
(M22) Thus the official calendar was completely divorced, except at rare
and long intervals, from what may be called the natural calendar of the
shepherd, the husbandman, and the sailor—that is, from the course of the
seasons in which the times for the various labours of cattle-breeding,
tillage, and navigation are marked by the position of the sun in the sky,
the rising or setting of the stars, the fall of rain, the growth of
pasture, the ripening of the corn, the blowing of certain winds, and so
forth. Nowhere, perhaps, are the events of this natural calendar better
marked or more regular in their recurrence than in Egypt; nowhere
accordingly could their divergence from the corresponding dates of the
official calendar be more readily observed. The divergence certainly did
not escape the notice of the Egyptians themselves, and some of them
apparently attempted successfully to correct it. Thus we are told that the
Theban priests, who particularly excelled in astronomy, were acquainted
with the true length of the solar year, and harmonized the calendar with
it by intercalating a day every few, probably every four, years.(49) But
this scientific improvement was too deeply opposed to the religious
conservatism of the Egyptian nature to win general acceptance. “The
Egyptians,” said Geminus, a Greek astronomer writing about 77 B.C., “are
of an opposite opinion and purpose from the Greeks. For they neither
reckon the years by the sun nor the months and days by the moon, but they
observe a peculiar system of their own. They wish, in fact, that the
sacrifices should not always be offered to the gods at the same time of
the year, but that they should pass through all the seasons of the year,
so that the summer festival should in time be celebrated in winter, in
autumn, and in spring. For that purpose they employ a year of three
hundred and sixty-five days, composed of twelve months of thirty days
each, with five supplementary days added. But they do not add the quarter
of a day for the reason I have given—namely, in order that their festivals
may revolve.”(50) So attached, indeed, were the Egyptians to their old
calendar, that the kings at their consecration were led by the priest of
Isis at Memphis into the holy of holies, and there made to swear that they
would maintain the year of three hundred and sixty-five days without
intercalation.(51)
(M23) The practical inconvenience of a calendar which marked true time
only once in about fifteen hundred years might be calmly borne by a
submissive Oriental race like the ancient Egyptians, but it naturally
proved a stumbling-block to the less patient temperament of their European
conquerors. Accordingly in the reign of King Ptolemy III. Euergetes a
decree was passed that henceforth the movable Egyptian year should be
converted into a fixed solar year by the intercalation of one day at the
end of every four years, “in order that the seasons may do their duty
perpetually according to the present constitution of the world, and that
it may not happen, through the shifting of the star by one day in four
years, that some of the public festivals which are now held in the winter
should ever be celebrated in the summer, and that other festivals now held
in the summer should hereafter be celebrated in the winter, as has
happened before, and must happen again if the year of three hundred and
sixty-five days be retained.” The decree was passed in the year 239 or 238
B.C. by the high priests, scribes, and other dignitaries of the Egyptian
church assembled in convocation at Canopus; but we cannot doubt that the
measure, though it embodied native Egyptian science, was prompted by the
king or his Macedonian advisers.(52) This sage attempt to reform the
erratic calendar was not permanently successful. The change may indeed
have been carried out during the reign of the king who instituted it, but
it was abandoned by the year 196 B.C. at latest, as we learn from the
celebrated inscription known as the Rosetta stone, in which a month of the
Macedonian calendar is equated to the corresponding month of the movable
Egyptian year.(53) And the testimony of Geminus, which I have cited,
proves that in the following century the festivals were still revolving in
the old style.
(M24) The reform which the Macedonian king had vainly attempted to impose
upon his people was accomplished by the practical Romans when they took
over the administration of the country. The expedient by which they
effected the change was a simple one; indeed it was no other than that to
which Ptolemy Euergetes had resorted for the same purpose. They merely
intercalated one day at the end of every four years, thus equalizing
within a small fraction four calendar years to four solar years.
Henceforth the official and the natural calendars were in practical
agreement. The movable Egyptian year had been converted into the fixed
Alexandrian year, as it was called, which agreed with the Julian year in
length and in its system of intercalation, though it differed from that
year in retaining the twelve equal Egyptian months and five supplementary
days.(54) But while the new calendar received the sanction of law and
regulated the business of government, the ancient calendar was too firmly
established in popular usage to be at once displaced. Accordingly it
survived for ages side by side with its modern rival.(55) The spread of
Christianity, which required a fixed year for the due observance of its
festivals, did much to promote the adoption of the new Alexandrian style,
and by the beginning of the fifth century the ancient movable year of
Egypt appears to have been not only dead but forgotten.(56)