Calendars and Years: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient Near East.

AuthorSpalinger, Anthony
PositionBook review

Calendars and Years: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient Near East. Edited by JOHN M. STEELS. Oxford: OxBow Books, 2007. Pp. vii + 167. $50 (paper). [Distributed by The David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Conn.]

This interesting yet slim tome appears, at first, to provide the specialist in astronomical techniques of antiquity with yet another volume of new and original interpretations, especially non-orthodox ones. The work, however, is extremely limited and restricted to just seven scholars whereas, at least in the field of Egyptology, many more could have been included. I shall review the Egyptian material in extenso concluding with some pertinent comments in regard to the editor's own useful study on a Mesopotamian question.

Sarah Symons presents a revisionist chapter in which the researches of Otto Neugebauer and Richard A. Parker are rejected. At the outset it must be stated that this approach is sometimes very salutary, except that all too often younger scholars see the necessity of refuting past experts, especially brilliant researchers such as Neugebauer. Hence, it was with a degree of trepidation that I read her selection titled "A Star's Year: The Annual Cycle in the Ancient Egyptian Sky" (pp. 1-33). She rejected the "paired rising and setting theory" of the decanal stars and attempted to provide a new hypothesis in order to explain the out-of-date records on the coffins in question. What is significant is that she, too, saw the weaknesses in Christian Leitz's Altagyptische Sternuhren (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), a work subject to my criticisms published in CdE 74 (2000): 296-300, but a study that Symons ignored. On the other hand, whereas I agree with the author that the exactitude argued by Neugebauer and Parker may have been overstressed, and that "[f]actors other than slippage of the Egyptian civil year against the observable sky" were undoubtedly present, it remains the case that the two American scholars clearly indicated the imprecise nature of the ancient Egyptian visually based records in the final pages of their Egyptian Astronomical Texts I (Providence and London: Lund Humphries, 1960).

Yet Symons seems not to have combed the large body of crucial secondary literature on this matter. I was thus disappointed that, if only because of her strong challenge to Neugebauer and Parker, she avoided a raft of important Egyptological articles and chapters in books. I will cite only the following works of Ronald Wells: "The Goddess Nut...

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