Shanati: A Project to Reconstruct the 1st Millennium BCE Ancient Babylonian Chronology to the Day

• In Event: Digital & Oral Pedagogies

Abstract

The Babylonian Calendar was the main calendar of the Ancient World in the 1st millennium BCE. Initially spread by the wide conquests of the Assyrians, it was subsequently employed by the Babylonian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian Empires for their imperial timekeeping. The ancient Judeans adopted the use of the Babylonian Calendar in the Neo-Babylonian or Achaemenid Periods. As Judaism developed, the Babylonian Calendar became incorporated therein as the Jewish religious calendar, in which place it still serves to this day.
Due to its luni-solar nature, the Babylonian Calendar requires constant management to maintain the alignment of the months with their customary seasons and to determine the beginning of each new month. Although the calendar Jews use today has long been fixed, in that all of the calendrical decisions are pre-determined, the ancient Babylonian calendar was continually regulated. This makes reconstructing the sequence of the actual lengths of months and years difficult.
Although commendable for its ingenuity in its day, the current standard reconstruction of the Babylonian chronology by Parker & Dubberstein (1942, 1956, 1971) is lacking in several regards, leading to its inaccuracy at the day scale.
Shanati is working to overhaul the daily ancient Babylonian chronology by collecting and integrating all available textual evidence, from among the 80,000+ potentially relevant, mainly cuneiform texts. During interludes in which there is less textual evidence, a newly calibrated astronomical model for first lunar visibility will be relied upon. Therefore, Shanati’s chronology will give the best possible daily timeline and conversion to proleptic Julian dates. This will serve as the basis for regional chronology and stand as a major backdrop for comparison in early Jewish calendrical discussions.
Shanati’s results will be published in book format and be made freely available through its website, shanati.org.
Alexander Jones, Director of New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, is Shanati’s Principal Investigator, and David Danzig, Doctoral Candidate at ISAW, is the project’s Creator and Lead Researcher. We wish to express our gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its award of a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to fund Shanati.

Author

• David Danzig, New York University, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World