[ Egyptiana ] Calendrical musings

[kiya]

So this is one of the books I got for my pre-birthday extravaganza, because of course one of my zillions of projects is a calendrical work.

It's making a strong case for a linked dual calendar with a great cycle of 1460 years, complete with several referents from ancient texts that match up mathematically. Which would put us about a third of the way through the cycle beginning in 1599, with the festivals about one season out of synch.

Basically: events like the rising of Sopdet were marked as happening on such and such a day of such and such a season in the nth year of king whoosie. Which means, in the rare cases where we have a Sothic date and a "civil calendar" date for things we can pin them down pretty precisely, due to the whole 'that particular combo happens for about four years in any given 1460-year period' portion.

(Said calendar included, quoting from a stele, "Feast of the Exit of Sirius, according to the days of his crossing". So yeah. That was 1 Shomu 4, that year.)

Now, crazed numbercrunching me thinks this is pretty cool and is half-tempted to come up with some way of turning it into a standardly drifting calendar especially since I know when the Great Year starts and can thus do the calculations fairly straightforwardly. (I am dubious about some of the claims about the sidereal part of the calendar but can grant forgiveness for minor astrophysical errors since it's basically arguing the presence of observational correction.)

(Of course that makes me want to correct for precession. That way lies madness.)

On the other hand, there's the calendrical hack that I had half worked out conceptwise, that lets things fall more or less in keeping with the modern civil year with minimal calculations. Which is probably superior for accessibility, but less cool.

Because I'm a giant nerd. Who really, really, really likes fiddly bits more than almost anyone else I know.

I know I'll probably wind up discarding the ancients' calendar drift system when I try to actually formalise this work, but I think at this point I'm going to be sad about it. Heh.