Dating in Egypt’s Old Kingdom

By Johannes Jüngling (Vienna)

Of the things we take for granted, time (and its measurement) probably is among the most pervasive and, yet, also the subtlest. We are so used to having our everyday lives measured and structured by clocks and calendars – from daily wake-up alarms to New Year’s celebrations – that we rarely reflect on the principles that our mode of quantifying time is based upon. Sometimes, though, such reflections might be rewarding.

International Standardisation

Consider, for instance, the arithmetic progression of calendar years proposed by ISO’s^[1] international standard 8601.

This standard prescribes a four-digit year number (e.g., 2023 for the current calendar year), beginning with ‘0000’ = 1 B(efore )C(ommon )E(ra) of the Gregorian Calendar. Although there is an obvious arbitrariness to this prescription (i.e, the moment of change from BCE to CE), the remaining aspects of this regulation are linked to astronomical events in a reasonable manner – as befits a solar calendar.

A Gregorian = ISO year comprises 365 days, extended by occasional intercalary days^[2] so as to conform to the earth’s actual revolution around the sun (the so-called ‘tropic’ year). Thus, the coming year 2024 will have 366 instead of the ‘usual’ 365 days. And isn’t it fascinating to know that there is an unbroken tradition between this – ‘our’ – system and the solar calendar used as early as ca. 2600 BCE in Old Kingdom Egypt?

Time Keeping in the 3rd Millennium BCE

Although, of course, time keeping was a little different back then. While the Egyptian civil year, too, comprised twelve months (ꜣbd.w) of 30 days each, these months were structured in three seasons: ꜣḫ.t, pri̯.t, and šmw, and instead of extending one or more months by a day or so, the five remaining days of the tropic year were added separately, without constituting another month in its own right.

Moreover, intercalary days would not be experimented with until the reign of Ptolemy III (3^rd century BCE). But the core system of 365 days a year, organised in twelve immovable months, was already being used when Sneferu and Khufu had their pyramids built in Meidum, Dahshur, and Giza in the middle of the 3^rd millennium BCE.

But how do we know that? – Well, there is some ‘circumstantial’ evidence to this, and most parts really only surfaced (literally!) in the last decade.

Data Retrieved from the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri

First, of course, there are the already famous papyrus finds from Wadi el-Jarf. The fragments recovered at this ancient harbour site near the Red Sea contain the oldest Egyptian texts written on papyrus that have been found so far.

Among them are several ‘journals’ or ‘crew’s logs’ and other administrative text. These implicitly reveal the structure of the then-common Egyptian calendar by the way they are organised spatially: Below a ‘header’ line containing the respective season and month, the individual days are listed, alongside descriptions of the different tasks performed by the workers’ crew.

And this is also where we have a continuous listing of calendar days from sw 1 ‘day 1’ to sw ꜥrq.w ‘the last day’, which inevitably follows sw 29 ‘day 29’. Thus, the 30-days-per-month scheme is proved for as early as the 26^th century BCE!

Source: Tallet, P., Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I: Le “journal de Merer” (Papyrus Jarf A et B). MIFAO 136 (Le Caire 2017), p. 110 = pl. X.

An example for this is depicted in the picture above: On top of the respective work tasks, the day specifications , , , and (sw 27 to ꜥrq.w) are written.

The Proof of the Pudding: The ‘Palermo Stone’

Another scientific breakthrough regarding the time keeping in the Old Kingdom was only recently achieved by Massimiliano Nuzzolo in the course of a project dedicated to producing high-resolving 3D scans of the annals of the 5^th dynasty: the so-called ‘Palermo Stone’ and its associated fragments (see below, ‘further reading’).

Being a corpus of heavily damaged fragments of at least one and possibly more grano-diorite stelae, these annals document the individual reigns of the kings of the 1^st through 5^th dynasties of Egypt in the form of a continuous list of ‘year panels’ for every individual regnal year. Changes in sovereign are recorded meticulously: Upon the death of the old king, the remainder of the then-current calendar year would be treated as the ‘short’ accession year of his successor.

In the past, this modus operandi has caused some confusion because there seemed to be a passage right on the ‘verso’ of the Palermo Stone contradicting the assumed length of 365 days for a calendar year. In the 4^th register from the top, the succession of the kings Sahura and Neferirkara (the 2^nd and 3^rd kings of the 5^th dynasty) is described, but, due to the abrasions that the fragment has suffered, it has been virtually impossible to discern the number of months and days left to Sahura’s final regnal year, and, in turn, also to Neferirkara’s first, with presumably only 5 months and 10 days being attested for the former, and 2 months and 7 days for the latter.

These numbers would amount to just 227 days – far too few for both a solar or even a lunar year, which makes the matter very problematic. If a fully-fledged solar calendar year was used as early as in the reign of Khufu, then why would it be abandoned in favour of a lesser fitting shorter year later on in the subsequent dynasty?

After: Wilkinson, T. A. H.: Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt. The Palermo Stone and Its Associated Fragments. SE (London, New York 2000), fig. 3. (Red Marks by JJ.)

Well, the matter used to be problematic prior to the recent scans and personal examinations of the stone by the Palermo Stone project:

Source: Nuzzolo, M.: The Palermo Stone and Its Associated Fragments: New Discoveries on the Oldest Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt, JEA 107, 2021, p. 63, fig. 4.

RTI and the Solution of the Riddle

Reflectance Transformation Imaging (or ‘RTI’; go check it out!) brought about the solution. The team of the Palermo Stone Project applied it on the surface of the fragment, and delivered the proof that the number of months recorded here actually is nine, while that of the days appears to be – with some doubt – 28.

Together with the 67 days of his successor’s accession year, the sum of this would amount to a perfect 365-days cycle. (And we are not even talking about the fact that the scans also confirmed the type of regnal year that is recorded here as a rnp.t m-ḫt zp or ‘year after the occasion’, which is an independent story for a different day!)

Towards a Historical Chronology for the Old Kingdom

Both my PhD dissertation and sub-project 2 of ‘Challenging Time(s)’, which I am responsible for, focus on this kind of research. In order to cope with the historical chronology of Ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom and the Early Dynastic Period, it is necessary to question ‘basic’ or even ‘trivial’ assumptions like the length and the structure of the civil-calendar year from time to time.

First, because the results might be significant, and second, because it’s a nice excuse to apply cool technological methods to sources we though we were already familiar with. The scanning of the Palermo Stone is ‘only’ the youngest impressive proof for this.

Footnotes

[1] With its 167 full-member states (as of November, 2022), the ‘International Organization for Standardization’ (ISO), based in Geneva (Switzerland), represents c. 94 percent of the world’s population. It has acquired some renown for standardising pretty much everything and is, hence, a dream come true for every dedicated bureaucrat. Note, however, that this doesn’t mitigate the organisation’s profit orientation: Buying the current full-text of ISO 8601 will cost you no less than 166 CHF …

[2] As a rule of thumb: Every 4^th year has got an additional 366^th day, while every 100^th year doesn’t. Every 400^th year, however, does. The two latter rules, by the way, differ from the ‘Julian’ reform of the earlier Roman Calendar, and are the reason the Julian Calendar is currently ‘trailing’ to its Gregorian counterpart by 13 days.

Disclaimer

This contribution is based on data collected as part of the ERC Starting Grant ‘Challenging Time(s) – A New Approach to Written Sources for Ancient Egyptian Chronology’ (GA № 757951), which has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (Department of Classical Studies) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The results published are solely within the author’s responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the funding agencies or host institution, which must not be held responsible for either contents or their further use.

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