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[German version] I. Ancient Orient In the Ancient Orient, the custom of naming or numbering years after the annually changing occupants ─ high-ranking dignitaries of the royal administration ─ of an eponymous office (lı̄mum/ limmum) is only confirmed for Assyria from c. 1900 to 612 BC, i.e. to the end of the Neo-Assyrian empire. For the 1st millennium BC, the following order generally applied:‘ king, commander-in-chief, chief cup-bearer, palace herald, chamberlain, provincial governor’. Under Salmanassar III (858-824 BC), after 30 year…

[German version] Egyptian and Mesopotamian lists of kings, which give the order of rulers and the number of years they ruled, owe their development to the practical demands of administration and law. They are prefaced, for legitimizing reasons, by mythic elements and speculative ideas about the beginnings of the various series of rulers. In this respect they are to be seen as an expression of an awareness of history and historical ideology. Sequences of kings with the number of years of their rule were kept in Mesopotamia demonstrably from the early 2nd millennium B…

I. Ancient Orient [German version] A. Mesopotamia From the middle of the 3rd millennium BC onwards, numerous systems for the names of the months that varied according to region and era are attested. In the Old Babylonian Period (20th-17th cents. BC), a system used throughout Babylonia gained acceptance. In the 19th/18th cents., there were initially autonomous local systems, among other places in the Diyālā area and in Mari, and up to the end of the 2nd millennium BC also in Assyria as well as during va…

(ὧραι, hôrai; tempora anni). [German version] I. Asia Minor/ Egypt The definition of seasons and of a year as a unit of time was largely governed by regularly recurring natural events, such as the floods of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (a short vegetation period and summer drought, the topic of the Sumerian poem about the dispute between summer and winter, see Kindler 19, 604) and of the Nile in Egypt (Nile inundation, vegetation period, summer heat, each lasting for four months). The prevalent…

A. Basic Principles [German version] 1. Term Calendar developed its modern meaning in post-antiquity from the Latin word for ‘debt register’ (  Calendarium ). In the following, the term is taken as an element of  chronography within a culture which attempts to describe or regulate annual periodicities. Typically, a day represents the smallest unit of a calendar ( Clocks). Rüpke, Jörg (Erfurt) [German version] 2. Social Construction of Time Hunting and farming both demand a harmonization with seasonal variations ( Seasons), thus leading to annually repeated patte…