THE YEAR IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

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The most ancient texts on calendars and festivals, which came to us from Sumerian cities, allow us to claim that the Mesopotamian calendar was solar-lunar; and we have never seen purely lunar calendar there since the texts had been compiled (Cohen, 1993, 3-20). There is no special word for ‘calendar’ in the languages of Ancient Mesopotamia. To define a year they used Sumerian mu and Akkadian šattu. The year in the calendar was divided into two halves. In Assyrian texts of the first millennium BCE, the summer was noted with a sign NE (kum2 ‘warmth’) with an inscribed sign of the ‘sun’ (NE x UD); the winter was noted with the same sign with an inscribed sign of ‘water’ (NE x A). Possible interpretations of these Akkadian logograms are ‘warm — dry’ and ‘warm — wet’. The first half of the year was written e2-me-eš in Sumerian and included seven months; the second half was called en-te-en, en-te-na and contained five months (Emelianov, 2015, 34). The names of those halves were Sumerian; their exact meaning is not known. According to a hypothesis by Benno Landsberger, emeš < im-eš means ‘warm wind’ or ‘warm weather’, and en-te-en < im-ten means ‘cold wind’ or ‘cold weather’. Akkadian names for those halves of the year were ummu ‘heat’ and kuṣṣu ‘cold’. There is a Sumerian fiction text provisionally called ‘The Dispute of Emeš and Enten’; two halves of the year brag about their perfect properties before the arbiter — god Enlil. Contrary to the reader’s expectation, Enten becomes the winner, because water is gathered in channels in his time, and it provides irrigation and prosperity of the country for the whole year (Landsberger, 1949, 286, notes 120; Emelianov, 2015, 16–46). The year is divided also into four seasons (only three of them are defined with specific names) and twelve months. We know Akkadian names of three seasons: daš’ū is the spring (from the verb dš’ ‘to unfold, to unfurl, to swell, to bloat’), harpu or ebūru is the summer (literally ‘early (sowing)’, ‘(early) harvest (of fruits)’), kuṣṣu is the winter (literally ‘cold, frost’). The autumn is not marked. From time to time they introduced the thirteenth additional month for the solar-lunar calendar after the first or the second half of the year.

In Mesopotamia, the New year (za3-mu(-k), rēš šatti) was celebrated twice, because the most important marker for the calendar cycle was the cycle of the reproduction of barley. The first, spring New year was called a2-ki-ti-še-gur10-ku5 — i.e. ‘akitu of the harvest’, because the barley harvest took place in the spring. The second New year was called a2-ki-ti-šu-numun — i.e. ‘akitu of the sowing’, because the barley sowing took place in the autumn, in September-October. The ritually fixed start of the year in Mesopotamia was associated with the first new moon after the beginning of the high water, in March-April. But all the barley was to be cropped before the high water. It fell not on one and the same day each year, that is why the start of the New year could be moved in several days and even a week. They waited for the beginning of the high water, then the new moon, and only after it they celebrated ‘akitu of the harvest’. They year included months of 29 or 30 days.

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Tags: Ancient Mesopotamia, Vladimir V. Emelianov