Stylesheet style.css not found, please contact the developer of "arctic" template.

This is an old revision of the document!


Ur III Calendars

Despite what appears to be attempts at standardisation, the formerly independent city-states, Umma, Girsu, etc., kept their own calendars after being incorporated into the Ur III state. Although some month names are identical across the calendars (ezem-dšul-gi, found in all calendars except for Nippur; and še-sag/sag(11)-ku5, found in all), most of the names were specific to the city where they were used and presumably related to local cultic calendars.

All calendars intercalated by adding an extra month ([iti] diri [mn], or [mn] min[3]), but this was not done in regular intervals, nor consistently across the empire. Though not demonstrated with certainty, very probably intercalation was employed, on average every three years, in an attempt to synchronize solar and lunar calendars.

Go here for a tabular view of Ur III month names in Drehem, Girsu, Nippur, Ur, Umma and Irisagrig (click on the head of columns to sort the names according to the named local calendars).

No generally accepted sub-divisions of the month into weeks are known from Ur III texts; the designations u4-sakar gu-la (“great crescent”), u4-sakar u4 1(u)-5(diš) (“crescent of day 15”), e2-u4-1(u)-5(diš) (“house of day 15”), and e2-u4-7(diš) (“house of day 7”), and variants of these qualifications, are suggestive of a simple division of the administrative 30-day month into two 15-day halves, and of each half into two “weeks” of 7-8 days.

Drehem month names

a2-ki-ti, the month of the New Year’s festival. The sixth month before Shu-Suen’s third year, and during that year. The seventh month following Shu-Suen’s third year (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-an-na, “Festival of heaven“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-maḫ, “Lofty festival” (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-(d)me-ki-gal2, “Festival of Mekigal“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-dnin-a-zu, “Festival of Ninazu“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-dšu-dsuen, “Festival of Šu-Suen“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ezem-dšul-gi, “Festival of Šulgi“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ki-siki-dnin-a-zu “Weaving-place(?) of Ninazu” (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

maš(2)-da3-gu7, “Gazelle Feast“ (click here for Drehem texts mentioning this month)

še-sag(11)-ku5, “Harvest“. Month 12 before the reforms in Shu-Suen's 3rd year. Not used in Shu-Suen year 3. Month 1 in the years following Shu-Suen 3 (click here for Drehem texts mentioning this month)

ses-da-gu7, “Piglet Feast“ (click here for all Drehem texts mentioning this month)

šu-eš(5)-ša, "…". Month 8 before the reforms in Shu-Suen’s 3rd year (click here for Drehem texts mentioning this month)

u5-bi2(mušen)-gu7, “ubi(bird) Feast“ (click here for Drehem texts mentioning this month)

diri, “extra (month)“; the abbreviated designation for the 13th month was not employed in Drehem

Nippur month names

Ur month names

Girsu month names

Umma month names

Irisagrig month names

Adab month names

ur_iii_calendars.1457316053.txt.gz · Last modified: 2016/03/07 02:00 by englund
CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International
Driven by DokuWiki Recent changes RSS feed Valid CSS Valid XHTML 1.0