By Nadia Vidro and Ilaria Bultrighini

Norwegian Girdle Calendar
The Schøyen Collection, MS 2913, Oslo and London

On 3–5 July 2017 the ERC Calendars project team, together with the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies, ran our final conference Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This conference presented the outcomes of the team’s research on the history and evolution of calendars in late antique and medieval societies, together with contributions from international collaborators in the field.

Jump to day 1, Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages   /   Jump to day 2, Later Middle Ages

The conference opened in the evening of 3 July with a keynote lecture How calendars become standardized and fixed by Sacha Stern, the project’s PI. Stern introduced the ERC Advanced Grant Project Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Standardization and Fixation and described its five research areas. He then set out to explain how calendars in Europe and the Near East transformed from flexible, non-standard and predominantly lunar calendars of the ancient world to fixed and predominantly solar calendars of the early Middle Ages. Stern connected the standardization of calendars with the formation of empires with their imperial culture and unified administration, and with religious changes from pagan pluralism to orthodox monotheism. Stern presented three case studies to demonstrate the processes of calendar standardization. The seven–day week stems from the two distinct traditions of the planetary and the biblical week, which gradually merged into one hebdomadal cycle, starting in the late 1^st century CE and culminating in the 4^th century CE. Stern recognised two main processes in place towards the standardization of the seven-day week: on the one hand, the imperial hybridization in the Roman Empire, and on the other, the diffusion of Easter tables and the impact of Christianisation. In the 921/2 the calendar dispute between the Babylonian and the Palestinian Jewish communities the main vehicle of ensuring that everybody used the same calendar was to write a book on the correct calendar and to decree that it be read regularly. The data line was conceived in the Middle Ages mainly by Jewish thinkers who, owing to their ideology of standardized time, strived to count the day of the week in the same way around the globe.

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The Workshop on “al-Biruni and his world” took place on Monday 15 February 2016 at UCL. There were six speakers.

François de Blois (UCL) spoke about “The new edition of al-Biruni’s ‘Chronology’: work in progress”. After an outline of al-Biruni’s life and personality he gave an overview of the manuscript tradition and the problems involved in producing a new critical edition of this important work.

Eleonora Bacchi (Bologna) spoke about “The manuscript tradition of al-Biruni’s ‘al-Qanun al-Masʽudi’”. She discussed the dating of some of the old manuscripts of al-Biruni’s big astronomical compendium and showed images of these manuscripts.

Raymond Mercier (Cambridge) gave a wide-ranging talk on “al-Biruni and the astronomy of ‘al-Qanun al-Masʽudi’”. After a detailed overview of the contents of the eleven books of this major work the speaker focused on a discussion of its astronomical content and of al-Biruni’s use of the work of his predecessors, especially Ptolemy and al-Battani. An examination of his mean parameters leads to the conclusion that his calculation of the mean motion of the sun is virtually identical to that of al-Battani. The planetary theory is taken entirely from the Almagest with a shift in meridian of 42;26 degrees corresponding the interval between Alexandria and Ghazna. But the daily motions of the outer planets are based on a fallacious recalculation. al-Biruni’s astronomical data differ strikingly from those of his older contemporary Ibn Yunus. Whereas Ibn Yunus’s parameters lead to a correct determination of planetary positions (according to modern theory) al-Biruni’s are wide of the mark. The speaker came to the conclusion that al-Biruni was a clever mathematician, but a mediocre astronomer.

Sacha Stern (UCL) spoke on “al-Biruni on the Jewish calendar: sources and authority”. The speaker took as his point of departure a passage in the “Chronology” (Sachau’s edition pp. 55-6; his translation pp. 64-6) which describes three different versions of the 19-year intercalation cycle as used by the Jews. The speaker compared this passage (written in the year 1000 CE) with three slightly older Jewish sources: first the Letter of the Babylonian Jews to their co-religionists in Palestine from the year 922 CE; then the calendar treatise of Joshua ben Allan from the early 10^th century; and finally the Responsum of R. Hayya Gaon from 994/5 CE. These reveal varied intercalation schemes evidently related to those described by al-Biruni. In fact there is at some points a close literal agreement between the Arabic and Hebrew sources, suggesting their dependence on a common literary source.

Carole Hillenbrand (St Andrews) spoke on “al-Biruni on Islamic history”. This talk focussed on the large extract from a lost work by al-Biruni contained (in Persian translation) in the final section of the history of the Ghaznavid ruler al-Masʽud by al-Biruni’s contemporary Bayhaqi. The extract shows al-Bayruni as a chronicler of intimate details of Ghaznavid court life in the first years of the 11^th century.

The workshop concluded with an animated paper by Robert Hillenbrand (St Andrews) on “The miniatures in the Edinburg manuscript of al-Biruni’s ‘Chronology’”. The Edinburgh manuscript 161, dated 1307/8, is a richly illuminated and illustrated copy of al-Biruni’s book, a major example of Ilkhanid arts of the book. The talk concentrated on a detailed comparison of the pictures in the Edinburgh manuscript with Chinese paintings of the same period. The confrontation shows the strong dependence of the Ilkhanid painters on Chinese visual vocabulary, but in particular the clumsy and imperfect assimilation of Chinese techniques, for example in the use of perspective.

Our 5^th Workshop, ‘The origins of the seven-day week’, took place on the 25^th of June 2015. With it, we inaugurated a new format of very focussed workshops, which are meant to address, in turn, individual research interests of each member of our multidisciplinary team. The first workshop of this new series dealt with the theme investigated by this post’s writer. The seven-day week stems from two distinct traditions: the Biblical week of the Sabbath, and the astrological, planetary week. The main purpose of this workshop was to explore how these two traditions emerged and spread in the Roman Empire, and how they combined remarkably into a single, seven-day unit of time reckoning that was to become standard in the medieval and modern worlds.

We arranged the workshop programme into three thematic sessions: ‘The planetary week’, ‘The Jewish seven-day week’, and ‘The seven-day week in the Roman Empire’.

After a brief general introduction by Sacha Stern (UCL), Wolfgang Hübner (Münster) opened the first session with a paper entitled ‘When and where was the planetary week invented?’. An examination of the (rather scanty) relevant sources led him to confirm the general assumption that the so-called system of the chronocrators – according to which the seven ‘planets’ rule in succession the hours and days of the week – underlies the planetary week cycle. This system is based on the ‘Chaldean order’ of the planetary spheres, which would thus appear to lead back to ancient Babylonia, the birthplace of astrology; nonetheless, there are no traces of this order before the 2^nd century BCE, when astral sciences were much developed, not in Babylonia, however, but in the Hellenised Egypt of the Ptolemies. Further hints pointing to an origin of the planetary week in Hellenistic Egypt are not lacking; on these bases, Hübner proposed that this weekly system was created during the 3^rd or 2^nd century BCE in Alexandria. Béatrice Bakhouche (Montpellier) spoke about ‘Evidence of the planetary week in Rome: issues and debates’. By reconsidering part of the evidence that had already been examined in the previous talk, as well as the most significant Roman sources related to the adoption and use of the planetary week in the Roman west, she emphasised how the Romans were strongly influenced by astrological and Pythagorean ideas towards the end of the Republican period. This may have played a role in the Roman adoption of the planetary week, which, however, had initially a strictly astrological use, before evolving into a real calendrical tool. Given the limited number of sources attesting to the existence and use of this type of week in the early imperial period, she argued that the planetary week was not officially used in the Roman west earlier than the late 2^nd – early 3^rd century CE. In addition, she contributed to the question of the origins of the planetary week by stressing how a Jewish influence on the Roman calendar can hardly be assumed, considering the Romans’ general view of the Jews, which was mainly linked to an idea of marginality. Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (Goldsmiths) offered a glimpse into a different historical and geographical context with her talk on ‘Notes on the Tibetan planetary week and its possible sources’. She pointed out that the planetary week presumably arrived to Tibet through India and, in turn, it was the Hellenic culture that transmitted this knowledge to India. Indeed, contacts and relations between Greeks and Indians go back to as early as the Hellenistic period, since the Indian campaign that Alexander the Great started a few years before his death. Unfortunately the times and modes of this transmission are not known; it is however attractive to imagine that the astrological notion of the planetary week spread towards India from Ptolemaic Egypt during the late Hellenistic period. We would thus have a further confirmation for the assumption that the planetary week originated in the Hellenised Egypt of the Ptolemies.

In the second session of our workshop, François de Blois (UCL) discussed ‘The etymology of Sabbath’. The Hebrew name for the seventh day has usually been connected with the verbal root š‑b‑t “to rest”, assuming either a denominal verb or a deverbal noun. Both of these options are, however, linguistically problematic. An alternative suggestion has been to connect it with Babylonian šapattu (or šabattu), which designates the 15^th day of the lunar month, the full moon, or a group of 15 days. This is phonologically relatively unproblematic, but it is difficult from a semantic point of view. The paper attempted to problematize this situation and offered some tentative solutions. Jonathan Ben-Dov (Haifa) enlightened us about ‘The early history of the Jewish week’. Despite the great antiquity of the Biblical seven-day week, the weekly cycle was not used as a principle for constructing the calendar in the Bible, nor is there any trace of days of the seven-day week in priestly literature. A change occurs in the Book of Jubilees, which dates to the mid-2^nd century BCE, and, slightly later, in the Qumran texts. The value of these sources as evidence that the week was used for practical purposes, however, is not certain. Days of the week are still absent from date formulae in the same period, and will make their first appearance, on ostraca, only in the 1^st century CE. Ben-Dov’s assumption is that the Jews started using days of the week for practical purposes in the 1^st century BCE; however, there are no traces of any connection of the Jewish week with the planetary week, which seemingly first appeared around the same period in the western Roman world.

My own contribution, together with that of Sacha Stern, made up the third and last session of the workshop. In my paper ‘The diversity and spread of the seven-day week in the Roman Empire’, I presented the results of the full database of literary, epigraphic, and documentary sources in Greek and Latin either including days of the week or dealing with the week, which I have been creating in approximately the last two years. I first focussed on the origins, earliest attestations, and diffusion of the planetary week in the Roman Empire, as well as on the contexts and uses of this dating system. My assumption is that although an actual calendrical use developed quite early, the planetary week first spread in the Roman west as an astrological concept, which most likely originated in Ptolemaic Egypt during the late Hellenistic period. During the imperial period the early Christians adopted the Jewish week with its six days denoted by numbers and the Sabbath as its seventh, and adapted it to their religion by dedicating the first day of the week – Sunday, the Lord’s Day – to their own God. However, the evidence shows that the Christian week did not gain much popularity, at least in the Roman west, where, despite reiterated attempts by the Church Fathers and preachers to eradicate the habit, common people, including Christians, largely continued to name the days of the week after the seven planets in late antiquity, due to the longer tradition of the planetary week in this area of the Roman Empire. Sacha Stern (UCL) discussed ‘The seven-day count in the Roman Empire: standardization and fixation.’ The main goal of this paper was to assess how standard was the reckoning of the seven-day week, i.e., to what extent, e.g., Sunday was the same day for everyone, from Ptolemaic Egypt to late Antiquity. Our database of ancient sources allowed him to carry out a statistical study, according to which in late antiquity – the period for which we have an adequate sample of certainly dated sources – the day of the week was overwhelmingly standard and in phase with ours. The study also confirmed the standard equation of planetary and Jewish/Christian days (e.g. day of Saturn = Sabbath). In the second part of his talk, he focussed on evidence covering the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods. He first showed the results of a similar, statistical study that he conducted on the material included in the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, which comprises securely dated papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, written by, for, or about Jews. The working hypothesis is that Jews did not work on the Sabbath, including legal work, commerce, and financial transactions, and therefore that most documents (contracts, receipts, etc.) should not have been written on the Sabbath. On this basis, it should be possible to verify whether or not this day was in phase with the standard week. According to this study, in these early periods the week was not standard and in phase with ours. A similar result emerged from an analogous study of a dossier of receipts for the payment of the ‘Jewish Tax’ from Edfu, in Upper Egypt. This is a special tax that the Emperor Vespasian imposed on the Jews in the Roman Empire after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE. A dated graffito from Pompeii from this same period, along with the sole dated document from the Ptolemaic period included in our database, further confirmed this result, and led to the concluding conjecture that the Sabbath in Ptolemaic Egypt corresponded to what is for us Tuesday or Wednesday.

This workshop was particularly well attended, and well received by the participants. Both members of our team and external attendees generally agreed on its highly instructive value, which applied to experts on the very specific topic of the workshop and ‘neophytes’ alike.

Calendars and Religion in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the fourth workshop of our ERC project ‘Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, took place on 18 February 2015. With this workshop, we aimed to investigate the interaction between religion and calendars; in particular, we sought to understand whether religion has been the main factor in the formation of calendars, as may be assumed in view of the massive presence of religious content in most calendars.

In line with the multidisciplinary nature and the broad temporal scope of our project, this workshop’s programme included very varied papers, which were arranged chronologically, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. After a brief but insightful Introduction by Sacha Stern (UCL), who emphasised how, in the time frame under consideration, the evolution of religion and calendars appears to have proceeded according to a similar pattern, from plurality to an ever increasing unity, Alasdair Livingstone (Birmingham) brought us to ancient Babylonia. His paper focussed on Babylonian Hemerologies, a large variety of texts whose common function was to determine the propitiousness or lack of it for each day of the year, often with regard to a specific activity. As one might expect, religious and cultic aspects were frequently involved in this calendrical practice. Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt) looked at the role played by religion in the Roman calendar during the Republican and early Imperial period. He argued that whilst religion was not directly related to the Republican calendar, which, in his opinion, was essentially a political-legal one, the Augustan period marked a turning point in the process of increasing inclusion of religious elements into the calendar. The ‘Feriale Duranum’, which is generally regarded as the only extant example of festival calendar used by the Roman army, was the subject of Ted Kaizer’s talk (Durham). This calendar was written on papyrus in the time of Severus Alexander (222-235 CE) and was found along with an impressive archive of documents at Dura-Europos in modern Syria. Kaizer explained how the military character of this calendar, which lists a series of festivals to be observed throughout the year, has in fact been questioned by scholars, and argued for a Palmyrene origin of some entries in the calendar.

Moving to the early Medieval period, James Palmer (St Andrews) showed that the synchronisation of the liturgical calendar, as the dispute about the date of Easter clearly exemplifies, seems to have played a key role in the Carolingian world (740-900 CE). François de Blois (UCL) spoke on ‘the ancient calendar at Mecca and the origin of the Islamic calendar’. He submitted the sources concerning the Arab calendar before Islam to a critical analysis and proposed a new hypothesis concerning the time and circumstances of the introduction of the Islamic calendar and the era of the Hijra. Nadia Vidro’s (UCL) talk explored medieval Jewish attitudes towards the unanimity of religious practice and the role of calendar in uniting the Jewish community or splitting it into factions, one desecrating the holy day of another. The diversity of these papers which, nonetheless, dealt with similar themes, along with the presence of distinguished experts in the various disciplines involved, generated several stimulating discussions and made this workshop particularly fruitful.

How is the Hebrew month of Tishri/Tishrei pronounced?

Pointed medieval manuscripts (e.g. of the Mishnah) all read Tishri. Classical and medieval liturgical rhymes all assume an ending of -ri. Latin transliterations of the name also end in -ri (e.g. in the Liber Erarum: see P. Nothaft, Medieval Latin Christian Texts on the Jewish Calendar, 2014, p. 91 – I have a lot more references on all this).

The pronounciation Tishrei is a later development (Ashkenazi, I have been told). Does anyone know when it is first documented?

Welcome to our ERC Calendars Blog. As PI of the project I would like to launch the discussion with a very specific question – maybe someone out there can help.

Ber Goldberg, who brought out the second edition of Isaac Israeli’s Yesod Olam (Berlin 1846 – a text we are studying in this project), published a very interesting article entitled ‘Shem mi-Shemuel’, on the common medieval attribution of a baraita and other sources on the Jewish calendar to the Amoraic sage Samuel. The article came out on 13 February 1862, when Goldberg was apparently living in Paris,  in the very short-lived monthly journal Ha-Mevasser (Lemberg, vol. 2:5-6, pp. 41-2). In this article, Goldberg quotes extensive passages from a manuscript that he says has ‘come to his hand’ and that he describes as a calendar book of the early Tosafists including Rashbam and Rabbenu Tam: והנה בא לידי ספר כ”י על חכמת העבור לקדמוני בעלי התוספות מהם הרשב”ם ורבינו תם אחיו

I have not been able to locate this manuscript. H.Y. Bornstein, in his article Divrei yemei ha-ʿibbur ha-aḥaronim, pt 1, ha-Tequfah 14-15 (1922), 321-72, on page 338, refers to this manuscript as ‘ms Guenzburg’. I do not know on what basis Bornstein wrote this. I first thought he may have meant the monumental, Provencal calendar compendium ms Guenzburg 365, because it is a calendar book and both Rashbam and Rabbenu Tam are cited there (on fols. 171r and 175r, respectively). However, after searching those and many other (though not all) parts of this manuscript, I have not found any of Goldberg’s quotations there. So is this the manuscript Bornstein meant, or did he mean another one? And anyway, was Bornstein right? Where is this manuscript that Goldberg quoted from? Can anyone make any suggestions about where I could find it?