were observed in the regulation of temples, and lunar years, &c., have been suspected. To find uniformity in any department in Egyptian practice would be exceptional. By the decree of Canopus, Ptolemy III. Euergetes introduced through the assembly of priests an extra day every fourth year, but this reform had no acceptation until it was reimposed by Augustus with the Julian calendar. Whether any earlier attempt was made to adjust the civil to the solar or Sothic year in order to restore the festivals to their proper places in the seasons temporarily or otherwise, is a question of great importance for chronology, but at present it remains unanswered. Probably neither the Sothic nor any other era was employed by the ancient Egyptians, who dated solely by regnal years (see below). An inscription of Rameses II. at Tanis is dated in the 400th year of the reign of the god Sēth of Ombos, probably with reference to some religious ordinance during the rule of the Seth-worshipping Hyksos; Rameses II. may well have celebrated its quater-centenary, but it is wrong to argue from this piece of evidence alone that an era of Sēth was ever observed.
From the Middle Kingdom onward to the Roman period, the dates upon Egyptian documents are given in regnal years. On the oldest monuments the years in a reign were not numbered consecutively but were named after events; thus in the Ist Dynasty we find “the year of smiting the Antiu-people,” in the beginning of the IIIrd Dynasty “the year of fighting and smiting the people of Lower Egypt.” But under the IInd Dynasty there was a census of property for taxation every two years, and the custom, continuing (with some irregularities) for a long time, offered a uniform mode of marking years, whether current or past. Thus such dates are met with as “the year of the third time of numbering” of a particular king, the next being designated as “the year after the third time of numbering.” Under the Vth Dynasty this method was so much the rule that the words “of numbering” were commonly omitted. It would seem that in the course of the next dynasty the census became annual instead of biennial, so that the “times” agreed with the actual years of reign; thenceforward their consecutive designation as “first time,” “second time,” for “first year,” “second year,” was as simple as it well could be, and lasted unchanged to the fall of paganism. The question arises from what point these regnal dates were calculated. Successive regnal years might begin (1) on the anniversary of the king’s accession, or (2) on the calendrical beginning in each year (normally on the first day of the nominal First month of inundation, i.e. 1st Thoth in the later calendar). In the latter case there would be a further consideration: was the portion of a calendar year following the accession of the new king counted to the last year of the outgoing king, or to the first year of the new king? In Dynasties I., IV.-V., XVIII. there are instances of the first mode (1), in Dynasties II., VI. (?), XII., XXVI. and onwards they follow the second (2). It may be that the practice was not uniform in all documents even of the same age. In Ptolemaic times not only were Macedonian dates sometimes given in Greek documents, but there were certainly two native modes of dating current; down to the reign of Euergetes there was a “fiscal” dating in papyri, according to which the year began in Paophi, besides a civil dating probably from Thoth; later, all the dates in papyri start from Thoth.
The Macedonian year is found in early Ptolemaic documents. The fixed year of the Canopic decree under Euergetes (with 1st Thoth on Oct. 22) was never adopted. Augustus established an “Alexandrian” era with the fixed Julian year, retaining the Egyptian months, with a sixth epagomenal day every fourth year. The capture of Alexandria having taken place on the 1st of August 30 B.C., the era began nominally in 30 B.C., but it was not actually introduced till some years later, from which time the 1st Thoth corresponded with the 29th of August in the Julian year. The vague “Egyptian” year, however, continued in use in native documents for some centuries along with the Alexandrian “Ionian” year. The era of Diocletian dates from the 29th of August 284, the year of his reforms; later, however, the Christians called it the era of the Martyrs (though the persecution was not until 302), and it survived the Arab conquest. The dating by indictions, i.e. Roman tax-censuses, taking place every fifteenth year, probably originated in Egypt, in A.D. 312, the year of the defeat of Maxentius. The indictions began in Payni of the fixed year, when the harvest had been secured.
See F. K. Ginzel, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, Bd. i. (Leipzig, 1906), and the bibliography in the following section.
2. Historical.[1]—As to absolute chronology, the assigning of a regnal year to a definite date B.C. is clear enough (except in occasional detail) from the conquest by Alexander onwards. Before that time, in spite of successive efforts to establish a chronology, the problem is very obscure. The materials for reconstructing the absolute chronology are of several kinds: (1) Regnal dates as given on contemporary monuments may indicate the lengths of individual reigns, but not with accuracy, as they seldom reach to the end of a reign and do not allow for co-regencies. Records of the time that has elapsed between two regnal dates in the reigns of different kings are very helpful; thus stelae from the Serapeum recording the ages of the Apis bulls with the dates of their birth and death have fixed the chronology of the XXVIth Dynasty. Traditional evidence for the lengths of reigns exists in the Turin Papyrus of kings and in Manetho’s history; unfortunately the papyrus is very fragmentary and preserves few reign-lengths entire, and Manetho’s evidence seems very untrustworthy, being known only from late excerpts. (2) The duration of a period may be calculated by generations or the probable average lengths of reigns, but such calculations are of little value, and the succession of generations even when the evidence seems to be full is particularly difficult to ascertain in Egyptian, owing to adoptions and the repetition of the same name even in one family of brothers and sisters. (3) Synchronisms in the histories of other countries furnish reliable dates—Greek, Persian, Babylonian and Biblical dates for the XXVIth Dynasty, Assyrian for the XXVth; less precise are the Biblical date of Rehoboam, contemporary with the invasion of Shishak (Sheshonk) in the XXIInd Dynasty, and the date of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings contemporary with Amenhotp IV. in the XVIIIth Dynasty. The last, about 1400 B.C., is the earliest point to which such coincidences reach. (4) Astronomical data, especially the heliacal risings of Sothis recorded by dates of their celebration in the vague year. These are easily calculated on the assumption first that the observations were correctly made, secondly that the calendrical dates are in the year of 365 days beginning on 1st Thoth, and thirdly that this year subsequently underwent no readjustment or other alteration before the reign of Euergetes. The assumption may be a reasonable one, and if the results agree with probabilities as deduced from the rest of the evidence it is wise to adopt it; if on the other hand the other evidence seems in any serious degree contrary to those results it may be surmised that the assumption is faulty in some particular. The harvest date referred to below helps to show that the first part of the assumption is justified.
The duration of the reigns in several dynasties is fairly well known from the incontrovertible evidence of contemporary monuments. The XXVIth Dynasty, which lasted 139 years, is particularly clear, and synchronisms fix its regnal dates to the years B.C. within an error of one or two years at most. The lengths of several reigns in the XIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties are known, and the sum total for the XIIth Dynasty is preserved better than any other in the Turin Papyrus, which was written under the XIXth Dynasty. The succession and number of the kings are also ascertained for other dynasties, together with many regnal dates, but very serious gaps exist in the records of the Egyptian monuments, the worst being between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties, between the XIth and the VIth, and at Dynasties I.-III. For the chronology before the time of the XXVIth Dynasty Herodotus’s history
- ↑ For the “sequence” dating (S.D.) used by archaeologists for the prehistoric period see above (§ Art and Archaeology, ad init. note).
