Local and Imperial Dates at the Beginning of the Hellenistic Period
Local and Imperial Dates at the Beginning of the Hellenistic Period

Summary/Abstract: Dating and time-reckoning has always meant a lot more than simply keeping track of time. It is of course true that from very early times onwards all people, either pastoralists or agriculturalist, had to take the seasons – which means the solar cycle – into account for the simple reason of bare survival. Since a year is far too long for many practical arrangements the omnipresence of the moon provided a perfect solution; the moon’s phases turned out to be an ideal length to divide one year into smaller units. The integration of a lunar cycle into the solar system is not self-evident though and the astronomical knowledge of people can often be judged by the way they tried to solve this dilemma. Still, a lot more factors come into play when time-reckoning and dating systems come into being. Both in the calendar – the division of every individual year – and in year-counting – some kind of superstructure for several years – religious, cultic, ideological and political elements played an important role. Since the sun, the stars and the moon were regularly worshipped in most religions in Antiquity, their cycles often determined religious festivals and other cultic events and therefore the calendar was closely linked with religion.1 Ideology, especially royal ideology, is found mainly in the system of year-counting. Because dates are omnipresent in all sorts of texts and also in all sorts of undocumented situations of daily life, it is a perfect way of communicating a certain message or stressing one’s name and authority. In an eponym system the name(s) of the (yearly hanging) highest state offi cial(s) is immortalised by linking his or their name to that specific year. In a monarchy the king could link his name and regnal years to the date formula or, in a year-name system as was the case in Babylonia until the thirteenth century BC, make sure that one of his major achievements was mentioned in the date formula of that year. Since religion is not apt to undergo rapid changes and it was more connected to the calendrical system than that of year-counting, the calendar will not be changed so easily. Ideological messages on the other hand must be ready to answer to every political change and they will transform far more easily. Consequently, the year-counting system can undergo rapid transformation, even several ones within the scope of a few years as we will see below.

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