Ebers Calendar

EH-bers

Definition

The Ebers Calendar is a 13-line hieratic text on the back of the first column of Papyrus Ebers, dated to year 9 of Amenhotep I (c. 1525-1517 BCE). Its host is a medical papyrus, yet the calendar lines up a fixed Sothic year — beginning with the New Year's Day feast (wp rnpt) at the dawn rising of Sirius — against the civil-year days, from III Shemu 9 in Amenhotep I's civil year 9 to II Shemu 9 in year 10. It is a key New Kingdom Sothic-civil document.

In Tradition

In the scholarship on Egyptian chronology — Brugsch (1870), Eduard Meyer (1904), Gardiner (1906), Sethe (1920), Clagett (1995) — the Ebers Calendar is the founding New Kingdom document for matching the Sothic year to the civil one, and so for dating Egypt absolutely. Meyer established the double-calendar reading; Gardiner cleared up the apparent month-name shift with four-to-six independent feast-day positions in the Sothic year; Sethe took apart Meyer's ad-hoc summer-solstice / Mesore reading. Clagett ties the correlation to Amenhotep I's years 9-10.

In Practice

The Ebers Calendar is a primary anchor for fixing New Kingdom dates in absolute time. Its 13 lines list 12 feast days of the Sothic year at 30-day intervals, each matched to a civil-year day, with the Sirius-rising day — the 9th of Epiphi — marked as the year-anchor; the same "9" mark is repeated in all twelve months, apparently a scribe's error, as Meyer noted. Historians use it to pin down the reign-dates of Amenhotep I against Sothic-cycle calculations. Its publication history is itself a foundational conversation in Egyptian chronology: Brugsch 1870, Eisenlohr 1870, Lepsius 1875, Krall 1885 (reading the throne-name Djeserkare as Amenhotep I), Meyer 1904 (the double-calendar reading), Gardiner 1906 (the Sothic feast-day positions), Sethe 1920 (the critique of Meyer), Borchardt 1935 (a lunar-month re-reading), Parker (the schematized lunar year), and Clagett 1995 (the ad-hoc-correlation reading).

Historical Origin

The Ebers Calendar was composed in year 9 of Amenhotep I (c. 1525-1517 BCE, by current Egyptological consensus). Papyrus Ebers was acquired by Edwin Smith in Luxor around 1862, sold to Georg Ebers in 1873, and first published by Brugsch in 1870. The standard documentary treatment is Clagett, Ancient Egyptian Science Vol II, Document III.2 (1995), which reproduces Meyer 1904 and Gardiner 1906 verbatim; see also Belmonte and Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order (2018), and Spalinger's Egyptian-calendar studies of the 1990s-2000s.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading