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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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Calendars in Antiquity - Empires, States, and Societies (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R5,465
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Calendars in Antiquity - Empires, States, and Societies (Hardcover)
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Calendars were at the heart of ancient culture and society, and
were far more than just technical, time-keeping devices. Calendars
in Antiquity offers a comprehensive study of the calendars of
ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Gaul, and all
other parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the
origins up to and including Jewish and Christian calendars in late
Antiquity. In this volume, Stern sheds light on the political
context in which ancient calendars were designed and managed. Set
and controlled by political rulers, calendars served as expressions
of political power, as mechanisms of social control, and sometimes
as assertions of political independence, or even of sub-culture and
dissidence.
While ancient calendars varied widely, they all shared a common
history, evolving on the whole from flexible, lunar calendars to
fixed, solar schemes. The Egyptian calendar played an important
role in this process, leading most notably to the institution of
the Julian calendar in Rome, the forerunner of our modern Gregorian
calendar. Stern argues that this common, evolutionary trajectory
was not the result of scientific or technical progress. It was
rather the result of major political and social changes that
transformed the ancient world, with the formation of the great Near
Eastern empires and then the Hellenistic and Roman Empires from the
first millennium BC to late Antiquity. The institution of standard,
fixed calendars served the administrative needs of these great
empires but also contributed to their cultural cohesion.
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