Liturgies and Calendars in the Politico-Religious History of Pre-Achaemenian and Achaemenian Iran

The present contribution focuses on some aspects of the history of the Avestan calendar in the light of the intricate process of acquisition of a foreign pattern such as the Egyptian one (with 365 days in 12 months of 30 days each plus 5 epagomena). If the original model followed by the earlier calendrical system is not clear and many hypotheses have been proposed, the new calendar surely was adapted through a Western intermediation, a fact in itself implying that, after the rule of Cambyses, the Avestan priesthood was in condition to acclimatize an external system, which was embedded in the skeleton of a different liturgical annual sequence. In this framework it is necessary to take into the due consideration the dialectical competition among various menologies, but we also must observe that the “Avestan” hemerology with its named 30 days did not find opposition and was largely accepted: a fact that objectively means a certain high reputation not only for the priestly circles that elaborated it, but also for their liturgy. On the other hand, Avestan hemerology like its menology do not attest or confirm per se the adoption of the Egyptian-like calendrical system; its use, in fact, is confirmed by other Avestan data, as we can deduce the numerical references to the figure of 365 days from the days placed between one Gāhānbār and the following ones, etc., but not by the presence of these names alone. In other words, there is no compelling reason to infer that when we find an isolated Avestan name of a month or of a day we automatically know also the precise system to which it belongs. In later Avestan we can easily and reasonably (in any case with a certain degree of presumability) suppose that it was already the Egyptian-like one, but in the context of the liturgical invocation these names could have been attested since earlier times, so that more cautiousness is recommendable if one would try to deduce incontrovertible chronological points of reference with regard to the stratigraphy of the earlier Iranian religious sources.