TIME AND TEMPORALITY

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Edited by

Ralph M. Rosen

-_ UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM

f= OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
 Copyright © 2004
by
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
3260 South Street * Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324

All rights reserved.

First Edtion.

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at the U.S. Library of Congress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

 CONTENTS
Preface... 1... ee ee ee Vii

ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME

Ralph M. Rosen es

1 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY

john C. Barrett... .............. 11

2 SHAPING LIFE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC AND

ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS
Chris Gosden... ... 2 ee ee eee ee ew DY

3. SCHOLARLY CONCEPTIONS AND QUANTIFICATIONS OF TIME

IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C. 750—250 BCE
Eleanor Robson... ... 1 1 ee ee eee 45
4 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA
Ludo Rocher ............ 00. wwe YI

5 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

Marc Brettler . . . ...........,.2..
x4141

6 TEMPORALITY AND THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME IN

EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT
DavidW Pankenier. ......... 2... 4. . 129

7 TOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD

Alex Purves. . 2... ee eee ee ee we ee 147

8 GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST

OLYMPIC GAMES
Astrid Moller... . 2... 2... ewe ees 169
9 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK IN THE
4TH CENTURY CE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE
Michele Renee Salzman ............ 185

Contributors ...................
243

Index ..... 2... ee ee ee eee we 214

 PREFACE

he chapters in this volume were originally presented at a

| conference at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2002,
“Time and Temporality in the Ancient World,” which I organ-
ized in my capacity that year as Director of the Center for Ancient
Studies. This turned out to be a truly interdisciplinary event, memo-
rable not only for the number and variety of disciplines represented,
but also for the sense of a coherent and common enterprise among
all participants. It is a pleasure, therefore, to present here a selection
of contributions from the conference, which I hope will convey to
the reader something of the collaborative spirit that suffused it.
The conference was funded by the Center for Ancient
Studies, with assistance from the Department of Classical Studies at
Penn, and I am grateful to both for also helping to support the pro-
duction of this volume. Greatest thanks, of course, go to the partic-
ipants themselves at the conference. All of them contributed in
important ways to what became a uncommon moment of intellectu-
al community, and the presence even of those not represented in this
volume can still be felt in these essays. Walda C. Metcalf, Director of
Publications at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthroplogy, took a deep interest in this project
from the very beginning, and I thank her for her energy and intellec-
tual acumen at every stage. I have had invaluable technical and edito-
rial assistance from Andrew Korzeniewski, and am especially grate-
ful to him for his ability to assimilate a diversity of scholarly styles
into a coherent whole, and always without a single complaint.
Finally, I thank my colleague in the Department of the History of
Art, Holly Pittman, whose unwavering commitment to the interdis-
ciplinary study of antiquity has been a source of inspiration to me
since the days when she served as the first Director of the Center for
Ancient Studies.
 ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME
Ralph M. Rosen

hen the Center for Ancient Studies was founded at the

\ \ / University of Pennsylvania in 1996, its guiding mission
was to encourage scholars of pre-modern cultures to
interact in fruitful ways with each other, without fear of crossing tra-
ditional disciplinary, geographical, or methodological boundaries.
There will always be plenty of localized research to perform on any
given culture, highly contingent upon historical or environmental
circumstances, but even within this context, when we encounter the
most fundamental questions of humanity, we often find ourselves
craving comparative data. This is especially the case when we are
confronted with phenomena that seem at odds with the sensibilities
of our own era, for it is often comparanda from other fields that
enable us to decide whether such phenomena are indeed idiosyncrat-
ic to a given culture or whether we simply can find no analogues for
them in our own. The comparative approach is a powerful induce-
ment for us to rethink the ways in which we reconstruct and concep-
tualize the individual cultures of antiquity and pre-modernity and
the ways in which we study them.
2 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

It was in this comparative and collaborative spirit that the

Center sponsored a conference on Time and Temporality in the
Ancient World in the spring of 2002, where the chapters in this vol-
ume began their life. This event brought together a diverse group of
scholars working on various aspects of time in pre-modern cultures,
most of whom probably would not have anticipated how fruitful the
encounter with each other was to be. The selection of essays in this
collection represents well the energy and excitement that the con-
ference generated, as speakers and audience discovered innumerable
points of contact among the many fields of expertise they brought to
bear on the larger theme.
As the essays in this volume indicate, there can be no doubt
that the topic of time and temporality in antiquity is ideally suited to
cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, Although each human
being presumably experiences time in a personal, idiosyncratic way,
the phenomenon itself has a distinctly universal quality about it that
aligns it with the other imperatives—birth, death, hunger, gender—
that all humans at all times must confront. The sun rises and sets, the
heart beats, the body ages, memories form and fade; humans may con-
ceptualize or name all these processes in vastly different ways, but they
could not escape them thousands of years ago, and we cannot our-
selves escape them today. All cultures—ancient and modern alike—
must at some point realize that the very notion of existence implies
some sense of time, whether it is a static time, time that flows in one
direction like a river or that moves like a continuous circle; time that
implies endless futurity or an ever-growing past. Consciousness of
self—arguably the most fundamental token of humanity—implies
consciousness of mortality, which in turn implies consciousness of
time, for it is impossible for the sentient human being to escape the
constant reminders of earthly mutability, corporeal decay, and the end
of life itself. Even attempts to transcend time must come to grips with
the fact that our inexorable movement from birth to death is a process,
and process itself implies some sort of movement through time,
whether we construe it as forward, backward, or in an endless loop.
 ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME 3

This volume also makes clear that ancient cultures

approached the question of time with as much variety and ingenuity
as they applied to the other monumental questions of human exis-
tence, and there is no reason to suppose that we can legitimately
articulate a comprehensive, monolithic pre-modern or ancient con-
ception of time and temporality. Yet it is remarkable how many
themes recur in these essays, how often we find homologous concep-
tualizations of time in cultures that had no apparent contact with one
another, and how enduring certain temporal structures seem to have
been across broad epochal expanses. Perhaps this should not surprise
us, since the rhythm of human existence itself is so relentlessly punc-
tuated by temporal markers, whether we think of the oscillation
between day and night or the lunar and solar cycles that appear invi-
olately stable while our bodies inevitably deteriorate. It is no wonder
that so many cultures, as the following chapters amply demonstrate,
find their way to metaphors of decline and renewal, cycles, circles,
and lines to assist them in expressing the peculiar ways in which time
is both highly abstract and almost palpably concrete. Time and again,
the essays in this collection recur to such questions in various forms,
despite their broad chronological and geographical range, and when
read together they provide elements of a larger story about how
humans construct time and conceptualize the activities of their lives
in relation to a past and future.
Our collection begins with essays by two scholars of
European prehistory, John Barrett and Christopher Gosden, archae-
ologists who ask difficult questions about what our perennially
incomplete material record can legitimately tell us both about how
prehistoric people conceptualized time and how we ourselves con-
ceptualize prehistory. Barrett moves deftly between second-order
questions of how archaeological procedure conceptualizes temporal-
ity—with its concern to recover moments in time or events in their
relation to the processes that are often held to account for them—
and how Bronze Age Europeans may have themselves conceptualized
time. Barrett is concerned not so much with how such peoples self-
4 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

consciously expressed and represented time (questions which are

nearly unanswerable in any case, given the nature of the evidence),
but rather in how their systems of land tenure and their burial prac-
tices seem to arise as a function of changing concepts of temporality
and, as he puts it, “temporal reasoning.”
Gosden is likewise interested in what we can infer from the
archaeological record—for example, building practices, the con-
struction of public works—about how ancient societies conceptual-
ized time, even when we lack textual or iconographic evidence fora
specific temporal self-consciousness. Focusing on a single site in
England which he has excavated, “Alfred’s Castle,” Gosden describes
how its Romano-British occupants evidently forged distinct links
with an Iron Age past, already quite remote in time from them, by
interpolating their forms of linear ditch-digging into ditch systems in
place since the Iron Age. The Romano-British period was obviously a
time of flux and transformation and, one assumes, at least some
degree of anxiety, as the native inhabitants of Britain assimilated
Roman practices. Gosden argues for a “wholesale re-attachment of
people to things” in this period of Romanization and suggests that
this process may well have stimulated an increased self-consciousness
about an individual’s place within a temporal continuum.
Many of the methodological and epistemological uncertain-
ties that archaeologists such as Barrett and Gosden must contend
with become less profound for cultures which happen to have left us
a textual tradition. In the case of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, as
Eleanor Robson amply shows, the enormous number of cuneiform
clay tablets that have survived to our time affords us an often remark-
ably detailed view of how these cultures conceptualized time and,
indeed, how they constructed their lives around very specific, insti-
tutionalized temporal schemata. Robson is particularly interested in
the scholarly tradition in ancient Assyria and Babylonia which was
largely responsible for formulating the systems of marking time that
ultimately informed many aspects of ritual and public policy. As
Robson shows, these scholarly sages, usually attached to royal hous-
 ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME 5

es in advisory capacities, were largely focused on the task of inter-

preting the will of the gods as it was manifested in terrestrial or
celestial signs, such as planetary or stellar movements, and, especial-
ly, the cycles of the sun and moon. Robson’s discussion reveals a fas-
cinating moment of intellectual history where acute empirical—
some might say proto-scientific—observation intersected with tradi-
tional belief systems. The result, as Robson demonstrates, was an
extraordinarily elaborate calendrial system, rooted in precise math-
ematical’ and astronomical formulations, but largely in the service of
the great non-scientific goals that still interest us today, namely, how
to understand and, one: hopes, control. the forces of good and evil
that pervade the world.
Ludo. Rocher notes in his chapter the influence of
Babylonian astronomy and mathematics on classical Indian concep-
tions. of time, as well as the likelihood that Greek thought also
informed Indian theories of cyclic time. and “world ages” (known as
a yuga/kalpa system). But Rocher argues that these theories may
well have had indigenous origins within Indian culture itself and need
not have been appropriated wholesale from other cultures. Despite
interesting coincidences between the Indian concept of the kalpa (a
term referring to a period of time, frequently associated with specif-
ically divine time) and Babylonian numerology, Recher argues that
Indian notions of temporal cycles could well have developed inde-
pendently of professional astronomers and philosophers, especially
foreign ones, such as the Babylonian ummanu he discusses. Rocher
further challenges. a, well-known argumentum ex silentio, namely that
the yuga/kalpa system of cyclical time must be post- Vedic because it
is not mentioned in the Vedic literature. Rocher points out that Vedic
texts had, in fact, a limited audience and can hardly be taken to rep-
resent the views of contemporary Indian society as a whole. Rocher
does find evidence that these texts. allude to notions of cyclical time,
even if they do not explicitly describe them. Ultimately, Rocher
would like to locate the origins of the yuga/kalpa system in an extra-
Vedic space, that is, among a broader population of nonspecialists
6 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

who would have been as deeply sensitive to the cycles and temporal
markers of the natural world around them as any self-styled intellec-
tual of the day.
As this collection shows, one of the most persistent
dichotomies we find across many pre-modern societies is that
between cyclical and teleological time. The choices seem clear
enough: one considers the inevitable progression of a human life
from birth to death and concludes that time marches inexorably for-
ward toward a telos, or goal. At the same time, this apparently linear
progression of a human life span is situated within the temporal
markers of nature that seem repetitive, cyclical, and fundamentally
stable through time. As these essays make clear, over the millennia
much ingenuity has been directed at these apparently contradictory
models of time, as people variously attempted either to reconcile
them, privilege one over the other, or explain them in terms that
leave empiricism or human rationality behind.
Marc Brettler discusses precisely this tension between tele-
ological (or eschatological) and cyclical, periodically recurrent time
in the Hebrew Bible. Despite the fact that the Bible does not offer
much in the way of second-order, philosophical discourse about
time, many passages suggest a notion of cyclical time. Brettler exam-
ines the evidence of Ecclesiastes and Judges, in particular, that at
least some ancient Israelites believed that events recur through time,
although only God controls and can understand why things happen
when and as they do. Biblical scholars, however, have often contrast-
ed this notion with what they believe to be a distinct eschatological
strand elsewhere in the Bible, especially in the books of the Prophets,
which often speak of the “end of time.” As earlier scholars have point-
ed out, such prophecies for the future usually involve a return to a
past state or past conditions within Israel’s history, and Brettler
argues that it is inaccurate and misleading to refer to such periods as
“eschatological” in the sense of a telos arrived at in a linear temporal
progression. While the Bible does not explicitly address the many
questions that arise when one juxtaposes a prophetic future time
 ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME 7

with an over-all scheme of cyclical time, Brettler maintains that the

two notions are far less contradictory than has often been supposed.
Within the field of scholarship on ancient China, a similar
debate has also emerged over whether this culture subscribed pre-
dominantly to a linear or cyclical conception of time. As David
Pankenier points out, scholars in recent decades have tended to
regard the conception of time in ancient China as, on the whole,
basically linear and irreversible. Pankenier shows how Western schol-
ars might indeed reach such a sweeping conclusion and in what sens-
es it accurately characterizes certain aspects of ancient China. But he
proceeds to argue that our own notions of temporality, history, and
causation often impede a deeper understanding of how ancient
Chinese culture (insofar as one can even speak so categorically of
such a complex and diverse culture) actually conceptualized the rela-
tionship among events through time. Pankenier stresses an early
Chinese idea of “connectedness” and “correspondence” among events
that does not always imply causation or a traditional Western sense of
ordered temporality. His close textual analysis of a work by the influ-
ential Han dynasty philosopher, Dong Zhongshu, uncovers in Dong’s
hexagrams from The Book of Changes a metaphorical conceptualiza-
tion of time and history drawn from weaving, where the warp and
weft of a fabric proceed in a direction simultaneously linear and
recursive, but with a resulting pattern that can only be comprehend-
ed as a totality that emerges from their interrelationship. As
Pankenier’s essay makes clear, a variety of metaphors for time were
available to the ancient Chinese, depending on one’s particular per-
spective. Some of these were highly concrete and spatial, others
more abstract and symbolic.
Alex Purves finds a similar diversity and boldness of
metaphor in archaic Greece in her essay on the epic poet Hesiod.
Purves principally seeks here to analyze the organization of time in
Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem that explicitly problematizes the question
of divine and human temporality. Ostensibly concerned with a
genealogy of the gods—the defeat of older, past generations, by a
8 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

newer one that “always is” —-the Theogony recounts the process by
which the eternally present Zeus actually manipulates time by incar-
cerating the older gods (who represent past time) under the earth
while physically ingesting the potential for a future time, namely,
Zeus’s offspring. Hesiod is able to conceptualize time as something
that can be contained, whether it be in the vessel of Zeus’s body or
in a prison beneath the earth. If all this seems rather poetic and
remote from the lived reality of ancient Greece, Purves astutely dis-
cusses how in his other great poem, Works and Days—a very different
sort of effort set in the form of a didactic “farmer’s almanac’—
Hesiod can again use concrete spatial metaphors of containment
(jars, pails, granaries) to describe time, but here in the context of
agriculture and household management. While the temporal cycles
of the natural world (days, seasons) recur in a predictable, seemingly
endless, fashion, Hesiod’s farmer, like Zeus himself in the Theogony,
can intervene and exercise some control over the effects of time on
his own life.
One area in which all ancient cultures struggled to control
and organize time was in chronography, the very practical business of
keeping records, dating events, marking historical intervals, and
periodizing their own histories. Each of the cultures examined in this
collection developed idiosyncratic methods of situating themselves
relative to a past and present (and sometimes even to a future), and
each had to confront the question of how to construct chronological
reference points. Astrid Moller tells the fascinating story of how
ancient Greek chronography came to adopt the foundation of the
Olympic games as their chief chronographical reference point. The
5th century BCE sophist, Hippias of Elis, is generally credited with
attempting to synchronize historical events in relation to the
Olympic games, though the question of whether he actually fixed the
traditional foundation date of the games to what we would call 776
BCE remains unresolved, given the insufficient state of our evidence
(no parts of an actual text of Hippias’s alleged treatise on the
Olympic games survive). Despite. a scholarly tradition that takes a
 ANCIENT TIME ACROSS TIME 9

rather dim of view of Hippias’s actual contribution to Greek

chronography, however, Moller argues for the foundational impor-
tance of his treatise and charts the subsequent efforts of Hellenistic
and late antique scholars to build upon his initial collection of
Olympic victors.
Our volume concludes with an essay by Michele Renee
Salzman in which she examines one ancient system of conceptualiz-
ing time—the notion of a week—that still persists, in variant forms,
throughout much of the world today. We tend to take for granted the
notion of the seven-day “week,” along with our focus on Sunday as a
marked day of rest, as a fundamental mechanism of marking time
within a year. But as Salzman shows, the modern week evolved from
a complex interaction of pagan and Christian cultural practices dur-
ing the 4th century CE. Salzman focuses in particular on the early
history of Sunday (the dies Solis or “Day of the Sun”) as a day of rest
or worship—institutionalized as law by Constantine in 321—and
shows that it actually took quite a long time for the idea to catch on,
largely, it seems, because it was an innovation without clear prece-
dent in pagan culture.
We find in this collection, then, a diversity of approaches to
the topic of time in antiquity—some contributors working primari-
ly with material and textual culture, some focusing on distinctions
between sacred and secular time, some on metaphors from the
mythic imaginary, and others examining the various ways in which
ancient societies harnessed time for utilitarian or chronographical
ends. Juxtaposing these cultures will yield remarkable intersections
and continuities, as well as discontinuities, in the ways in which each
engages with time and temporality. It is to be hoped that readers who
come to this collection from a specific discipline of their own will be
able to see how often the insights of one essay have implications for
another and how, in turn, this interdisciplinary enterprise will enrich
the study of time in even the most historically contingent contexts.
 TEMPORALITY AND
THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY
John C. Barrett

ithout writing, and thus without calendars, the periods

\ \ | of prehistory seem unlikely to contribute much to our
enquiry into ancient concepts of time. We could argue
that while the archives of prehistory lack a written testimony they
nevertheless cover the greater part of human history and thus bear
witness to considerable changes in the scale, organization, and mate-
rial expression of the human condition. It might follow that prehis-
tory should have something to offer that is original and interesting.
Even so, the claim that what we lose in detail we gain in scale seems
poor recompense for the apparent lack of the intimate understand-
ing of human history that becomes possible once written and oral
testimonies are available. This chapter will make the case for a pre-
history of temporality and set out the basis upon which such a pre-
history might operate.
I will begin by assessing the claim that prehistorians work
best, and should therefore restrict themselves almost exclusively to,
broad-scale analysis with its long-term perspective on human histo-
ry. I will then illustrate the issues covered by considering a particu-
12 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN.THE ANCIENT. WORLD

lar transformation that occurred in the first half of the 2nd millenni-
um BCE in northern Europe, a period toward the middle of the
Bronze Age that witnessed various changes in agricultural organiza-
tion, including the more intensive use of land, increasing population,
and the general emergence of longer-lived nucleated settlements.

The Problematic Relationships between

Event, Process, and Structural History
in Archaeology

Prehistory seems best understood at the larger scale when tracing

long-term changes in the material organization of human activity.
However, at such a scale we see the patterns of the past without nec-
essarily. understanding the mechanisms that carried these particular
histories forward. The question of how these patterns were generated
cannot be answered by limiting our analysis to long-term trajectories;
instead it requires some engagement with the detailed and fine-
grained nature of human life. The implication is that human history—
using the term in its broadest sense, as concerning the human past,
not restricting its use to the presence of written records—is not built
at a single temporal scale. Consequently we need to establish a clear-
er understanding of the ways different temporal scales of historical
process operate in relation one to the other. Any assertion that prehis-
tory must, by necessity, give predominance to one scale (long-term
trajectories of change) at the expense of another (short-term and.
local events) is therefore erroneous. It is surprising that archaeology
has not discussed these issues more fully. As Bailey (1981) noted: “As
a discipline which expends a large part of its resources on dating and
chronology, archaeology has made remarkably little contribution to
the elaboration of time concepts, perhaps all the more surprising in a
discipline concerned with time spans far beyond what is customary in
the studies of the anthropologist or the historian” (102).
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 13

The issue demanding clarification concerns the distinction

usually drawn between event and process. As commonly used, events
are treated as singular and bracketed in time, while processes are
treated in terms of their continuity through time. Processes may also
be characterized in more general terms; they are processes of a cer-
tain type. We can make the distinction between event and process
because we are content to use time as the axis on which events are
mapped and through which processes flow; time acts as our inde-
pendent axis of measurement and definition. As we shall see, the
event/process distinction underpins the logic of current archaeolog-
ical practice and it hinders interpretation.
The relationship between the moment of time (event) and its
continuity (process) has been widely addressed. Within the historical
disciplines the simplest models evoke the imagery of levels of histori-
cal time, metaphorically juxtaposing a surface of transient events upon
mechanisms operating over the long term. The argument may lead us
to the unremarkable conclusion that forces cause events, but the
implications are rather more important. The forces of history, from
this perspective, appear to be endowed with continuity over the long
term and explain from whence events arise as consequences. The long
term therefore appears to determine and explain the general direction
of history, where the occurrences of specific events map the “conjunc-
tures” of these forces and the operation of localized constraints. The
imagery is certainly effective. Events appear to be thrown up as the
passing and material manifestations of underlying forces in the way
that the catastrophe of a particular earthquake is the product of plate
tectonics impacting upon particular surface conditions.
An understanding of those generative mechanisms would
therefore seem to necessitate that we get beyond the immediacy of the
event because its historical significance is contingent upon the conti-
nuity of forces operating on a much larger scale. Let us refer to these
generative mechanisms or forces as the structuring of history where
the term “structure” is used as a verb. This usage has an important
implication: to structure something must involve the event of actual-
14 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

ly doing the structuring, The distinction between process as cause and

event as consequence is therefore less clear cut than it seems at first.
Processes must be generated through the workings of events.
Prehistorians have obviously found appeals for the writing of
“structural” histories enticing because they seem to describe what
they see themselves as doing. The problem is that prehistorians, and
indeed archaeologists in general, simply equate long-term sequences
of material conditions (things that can be traced over a long period of
time) with the structuring of history. This fails to take account of the
moments in which the structuring of history is necessarily realized.
The confusion may arise in the way the word “process” finds
two different usages in archaeology. One is as the description of the
unfolding of events over a long time span, such as the “process of
agricultural intensification” that may be mapped, for example, by a
sequence of increasingly large grain stores associated with crop
remains of increasing purity. The other is as a generative process that
attempts to explain the trajectory of, for example, agricultural inten-
sification. The latter might appear to be driven by various relation-
ships among a growing population, innovations in technology, and
developing land management. It is in the second and active sense that
process is misleadingly equated with the structuring of history. Thus,
archaeologists can refer to the process of the adoption of agriculture
both as if they were describing the sequence of material conditions
that takes us from hunter-gatherers to farmers and as if they were
explaining why the change occurs. However, all that has been
achieved is a simple reduction where sequences of material are pre-
sented as if they were a direct manifestation of the real dynamic of
history, in the way that a long-term sequence of residues deriving
from changing agricultural activities is falsely equated with the struc-
tural history of agricultural change itself.
In archaeology, events are manifest empirically in the mate-
rial record; we observe the result of events in the residues from their
execution. What exactly structured these histories, what brought such
events into play in certain ways, seems less clearly attested if not actually
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 15

entirely mysterious. It is as if we witness the passing of history as a tra-

jectory without grasping what had driven that trajectory forward.
The alternative is perhaps to treat archaeological events and
processes as different perceptions of the same historical mechanism,
an alternative view that becomes possible if we do two things. First,
we abandon the treatment of time as an absolute and independent
medium along which our various histories have moved. Time is not a
condition that is independent of the material conditions of history;
rather it is constituted in those conditions. Second, we treat the struc-
turing of history as the active condition within which temporalities
are formed and which is manifested as archaeological events and
processes, Structuring is therefore the event in which past conditions
may be mobilised by future intentions.
This may all sound very abstract, but the reality of the issue
is best grasped by reference to the problems archaeology faces in its
various attempts to move both from the description of what hap-
pened and to offer an interpretation of human history. These funda-
mental problems result from the distinction archaeology currently
attempts to maintain between event and process. It will therefore be
necessary to understand why such a distinction seems necessary and
therefore un-contentious in current archaeological practice before
proceeding toward an attempt to transcend these limitations.

The Archaeological Procedure

Archaeology uses the material consequences of formation events as

its empirical evidence. From this perspective, long sequences of
material appear to describe a historical trajectory of events.
Archaeology is proficient at establishing the nature of those events
that are implicated in the creation of some portion of the material
record. The interpretive problem is to explain the history of events.
Such explanations are usually couched in terms of process, where
processes appear to act as a kind of motor or agency for history and
16 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

where generative processes are often taken to be represented by

multiple and sequential events. Processes, in other words, appear to
make things happen.
It would seem that archaeological evidence (the material
residue) now has two jobs to do—first, to provide evidence of the
nature and development of historical conditions (a sequence); sec-
ond, to provide evidence that enables us to identify the processes that
brought those historical conditions into being. It is unlikely that the
evidence can do both, but the deeper problem is that we are using
process to describe a trajectory of consequences and to explain that
trajectory causally. However, given that causes cannot be their own
consequences it is hardly surprising that the explanations offered
appear less than substantial. The failure signals the gap in reasoning
that separates the event, as the problem to be explained, from the
process that supposedly does the explaining.
The premise underpinning all archaeological analysis is that
material residues derived from the human past not only survive but are
interpretable from the viewpoint of our contemporary world.
Archaeological procedures aim to establish the form and the historical
significance of the surviving record. Form concerns physical character-
isation, and we can establish a great deal about the physical processes
contributing to the form of the record. The historical significance of the
record on the other hand concerns the reasons for the regularities of
past events and thus the reasons for the regularities of human behavior.
Analysis must therefore move beyond the description of
what happened in the past to explain why things happened the way
they did. The initial recording procedures of field archaeology privi-
lege the event as that which needs explaining. They isolate individual
stratigraphic contexts and by cataloging the relationships of one con-
text to another; they move from the record of stratigraphic events to
a sequence of stratigraphy that records a series of formation events.
Processes initially identified in terms of cumulative events set us on
the path toward isolating generative processes of explanation.
Economic processes generate cumulative events relating to material
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 17

production, whereas cumulative events relating to mortuary rituals

may result from processes of social display. Thus, the prehistorian
synthesizes what might appear to be a partial record of events into a
larger pattern of processes (a pattern of things that happened). This
pattern, in turn, automatically implies the generative process that
will be used to explain that pattern.
Identifying process as mere repetition is not explanation.
But if explanation lies in understanding the reasons for the repetition
and the reasons for the direction of the cumulative events resulting
from that repetition, then we must identify why specific trajectories
of events took place through time. This in turn requires the identifi-
cation of an agency to drive a specific trajectory. We may see now the
way patterns of material traced over large areas, or sequences of
material traced over long periods of time, offer the image of large-
scale and long-term processes whose explanation then appears to
require the identification of a generative process, and thus an agency,
that operated on a similar scale. Thus, we arrive at the prehistorian’s
interest in explanations in terms of long-term so-called structural
histories where events are products of those histories. However, the
mistake throughout is to equate process (as simply a pattern of
change) with structural histories.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of
these issues in light of the significant confusions and false expecta-
tions they have generated. If a sequence of events demarcates the tra-
jectory of a process, then not only does that process obviously have
a direction, but any explanation for the sequence is expected to offer
a causal explanation for why that direction occurred. The trap is
sprung when we imbue the generative process with an intentional
logic that operated at the same scale as the pattern being explained
and which is further described entirely by the outcome of the chain
of events. The generative process occurs, in other words, in order to
do what it achieves. Functional explanations are teleological in this
way, where the explanation for the process is that it existed to
achieve the endpoint to which it ultimately arrives.
18 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Let us use a single example to illustrate the point. The

Bronze Age palaces on Crete arose through a sequence of building
events that are interpretable in terms of the events of mechanical for-
mation (working the materials) and the events of social convention
(architectural style and decoration). However, the historical issues
raised by these buildings are more complex. Scholars have sought to
understand the organization of mechanisms and conventions, and
they address the historical contexts within which such buildings
operated at their various stages of completion. The mechanisms and
conventions that governed the construction of the palaces are usual-
ly assumed to be dictated by the function of the completed buildings.
Consequently, arguments concerning the role of the palaces in eco-
nomic or ceremonial activities, along with ideas that their final devel-
opment saw them operating as administrative centers governing
regional economies, always mean that ‘explanations’ seek out reasons
for why such facilities may have been necessary in the first place. It
is these reasons (or needs) that appear to drive the process and ulti-
mately determine the agency of the human community that actually
built these structures. The extent to which that agency shared this
purpose in its own motivations or foresaw their implications is ques-
tionable, as is the extent to which human projects always fulfill their
purpose and never generate unintended consequences. More to the
point however, the function of the palace could not exist without the
palace to facilitate it, requiring as it did the material conditions of its
own operation. To propose otherwise results in an infinite regress.
The common assumption, for example, that the palaces of
the Middle Bronze Age were constructed to facilitate the operation
of an elite and that this necessarily explains the building program,
would mean that such an elite must have preexisted these palaces.
Operating presumably in some primitive form that needed the
palace to be built to achieve its full development, this proto-elite
must have been housed in pre-palace structures in the Early Bronze
Age. Needless to say, the search for such structures has become a
research priority. However, these Early Bronze Age pre-palaces
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 19

were presumably constructed to facilitate the needs of an even ear-

lier proto-elite form whose existence we might find attested in the
Neolithic. Continuing this way we might conclude that the
Paleolithic of southern Greece must have imprinted within it the
predestined need for the Bronze Age palaces.
Generative processes that explain a history of events always
appear to have a general logic. We speak, for example, of explaining
the origins of the Neolithic, where the explanation is singular and to
which a multitude of events conform. That we have been far less
successful in identifying that process might have given the hint that
all was not well in the entire enterprise. Long-term and general
changes in human conditions obviously occur, there was a Neolithic,
but does a structural history of these changes necessitate our
reliance upon these general and nonspecific processes to act as the
language for its expression? Structure and process are not the same.
What then are structures and how do they work? More often than
not we refer to structures as constraining. Constraints may include
the unequal and restricted accumulation of property, restricted
access to forms of traditional authority, or the restricted control of
technology. All certainly occur, but all are necessarily made to work
at various moments in their various ways to constrain the life
chances of some and benefit others. This “making to work” certain-
ly does not result from the vitality of material conditions; rather it
is a significance necessarily created, resisted, or re-negotiated in the
context of various discursive practices. Such practices demarcate
the events enabled within these structural conditions and from
whence their effects are realized implicitly or explicitly in the spe-
cific experiences of people’s lives. It is in these moments (these
events) that the character and pervasiveness of structural conditions
gain their reality and the human commitment to their continuity is
thus tested.* Structures link event and process and allow us to

* | take the post-modern “incredulity toward metanarratives” referred to by

Lyotard (1984) not as a move that refuses to accept the existence of the structural con-
ditions of history but as one that rejects the possibility that such structures both exist
independently of practice and are wholly determinate of historical reality.
20 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

investigate the extent to which events actually bring processes into

being. Events are the moments of making things happen, the move-
ment from a past state of affairs toward a future condition. Events
involve various forms of agency that expend energy and do work.
Making an object may contribute to carrying forward the econom-
ic process, but the process does not determine the event. If this is
accepted then the historical problem is to understand how events
are structured to follow a particular trajectory (where that trajecto-
ry may be described as a particular type of process).

The Structural Conditions of Agency

The terms structure and agency are used widely enough and in such
divergent ways that any brief employment here risks confusion.
However, these terms provide the means to avoid the pitfalls so far
identified—my argument has been that the concept of process in
archaeology has little if any explanatory value. Process is simply the
map of patterns of continuity and changes in events through time.
Attempts to extend the concept of process to incorporate genera-
tive procedures result in a reification where the appearance of mate-
rial change becomes an expression of the real force of historical
change. The failure of this reasoning is witnessed simply by the fact
that we still have so little idea about the processes behind the ori-
gins of agriculture, chiefdoms, or the state. These may be big ques-
tions, but the big answers have been slow in coming, In their place
we are presented with tautologies which simply state that for such
systems to emerge, the conditions by which they are defined have to
exist. Events and processes are ways of charting the conditions of
human existence through time and nothing more; they are descrip-
tive.
Agency on the other hand makes things happen, interven-
ing in the world by converting energy and doing work, and it makes
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 21

things happen out of the conditions of the moment. Human beings

are one type of agency that is particular in the ways that it is con-
scious, the ways it seeks to place itself in the world, and the ways it
claims the understanding of others. Structures are the possibilities
that exist for that agency to place itself in history. Structures are
realized when agency finds ways of linking the past to the future and
in the ways agency may ultimately link the local and particular con-
ditions of life to the larger and largely unimagined movements of
history. The strategies human agents use to carry the regularities of
life forward in the contexts of other cumulative changes occurring
in the wider environment can result in significant and long-term
material and institutional transformations. Such transformations are
rarely if ever planned. Indeed, when attempts have been made to
plan such transformations the results more often than not have been
disastrous for those communities who are the object of such plan-
ning. Life may be directed toward distant goals, but these are not the
same as the necessarily unknowable outcomes, unknowable simply
because the material terms in which they will be defined have yet to
exist.
The structural conditions of possibility are what enable
human agency to contribute to the making of history. It is only a
contribution; other agencies are also at work to change and trans-
form the material conditions of life, but the human contribution
most concerns us. The temporal definition of human agency is not
a question of the moment when it acts (the event). The prehisto-
rian does not investigate human agency by identifying the acts of
an individual. Nor is the temporal definition a matter of fixing its
position in a sequence of events (process), as if that sequence were
in some way determined by its own logic and the actions of human
agency were therefore similarly determined. Rather, temporal
definition comes with an understanding of how it was possible for
agents to establish a place for themselves in their own histories
and what the larger consequences of those strategies may have
been.
22 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Bronze Age Transformations

Despite the doubts shared toward 19th century schemes of techno-

logical evolution, it is still common to find prehistorians identifying
the Bronze Age with a particular stage in human social development.
Earle (2002), for example, argues that with the Bronze Age we wit-
ness the transformation of subsistence economies and the beginning
of a “political economy.” The distinction he draws is between
economies in which households maintained themselves in relative
autonomy and economies whereby surpluses were “mobilized and
allocated to support political activities, lifestyles, and operations of
social institutions and their leaders.” He continues: “By practical con-
trol, political economies are built on subsistence economies and
together organize all production, distribution, and consumption.The
three factors of production are land, labour, and capital” (Earle
2002:9).
The distinction between subsistence and_ political
economies, along with the notion that the latter evolves from the for-
mer, and with the general claim of the applicability of this sequence
on a world scale, presents a challenge to explain the process with ref-
erence to some general logic. It is certainly true that the archaeolog-
ical evidence associated with Bronze Age societies does indicate that
they were characterized by large-scale networks of exchange, com-
plex craft production, increasing levels of agricultural production,
the existence of rich burial assemblages, and a considerable mobiliza-
tion of labor and material investment in the maintenance of monu-
mental centers. These are economies of scale. We may also, if we
wish, arrange these economies in a sequence between the more local-
ized production and exchange that is characteristic of social orders
based upon kinship and the larger-scale political organizations that
operated beyond the obligations of kinship and which are character-
ized by the politics of the state. We may further recognize that such a
general order of scale is matched by particular trajectories of devel-
opment where the sequence is played out historically.
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 23

The historical problem of Bronze Age economies (if we

allow ourselves to follow Earle’s terminology) does not come down
to isolating a single process or trajectory of development by which to
explain their apparent regularities. Rather it is to trace the structur-
al conditions of possibility, that is the diversity of conditions out of
which new and at times similar forms of order arose at different
times, in different places, and from diverse conditions. Thus, we may
accept that the Bronze Age does represent a single condition on a
world scale and concerns the emergence of a particular structure of
organization without necessarily seeking a single historical explana-
tion. Such a program of analysis is empirical inasmuch as it concerns
itself with the operation of particular historical conditions and their
possible consequences.
This has significant implications for archaeological practice.
Normative procedures seek generalizations about the form of the
evidence as representative of social or economic conditions. This
allows for a simplification and characterization of diverse and com-
plex sets of data. Indeed this is how we have already treated the evi-
dence for the Bronze Age. However, the material must do a lot more
than this. For it to work as the basis of historical understanding it
must not be reduced from the representations of particular events to
a characterization of a type of process, Instead, the evidence must
address the conditions of possibility for human agency.
Among the general characteristics of Bronze Age
economies identified by Earle is the emergence of a land tenure that
permitted direct control over production, either by the community
or some portion of the community, along with the development of
technologies of more intensive agricultural production, and the
inheritance of rights of access from one generation to the next. This
general condition contributes to the characterization of Bronze Age
economies, and our historical understanding of that condition must
concern the particular conditions of possibility from whence it
arose. There is no one answer and no single line of causality.
However, given that tenure concerns a form of temporal reasoning
24 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

in that it binds people and resources together over time, then we

might expect that changes in tenure can only have arisen in part
through changes in that temporal reasoning.
Our investigation is now concerned with the conditions
under which changing concepts of temporality may have arisen, and
the evidence we draw upon must therefore be relevant to this issue.
I would stress that this is not the same as treating the material evi-
dence as the representation of concepts of temporality, in the way a
historian may treat a text as representing a calendrical system. We
are concerned with the conditions of making the world rather than
expressing it. This allows us a certain degree of flexibility in the
investigation of temporality, for prehistorians need not despair that
they have no representations of the idea but rather explore, opti-
mistically, the diversity of material locations in which the concept
may have been formulated. To this end, we shall to consider very
briefly the changing treatment of the dead between the Neolithic and
Bronze Age in one part of Britain.
Megalithic tombs are characteristic of many parts of the
western European Neolithic. Variable in design and covering a very
broad chronological range in their histories of construction and use,
these monuments usually contain the mixed and partial skeletal
remains of a number of individuals. The architecture often involves
some form of access between the outside world and the inner cham-
bers, and the mixed and often partial representation of much of the
surviving skeletal material evokes ideas of repeated use and cumula-
tive deposition. Indeed the elaboration of these monuments through
the deposition of human remains, artifacts, and, at times almost con-
tinual, structural modification, would imply they became reposito-
ries of labor, history, and emotional commitment for the communi-
ties within which they operated.
The megalithic tomb of West Kennet, on the chalk uplands
of southern Britain, is among those that appear a typical example of
such Neolithic monuments. For our purposes this role in represent-
ing the processes of mortuary rites in the period takes us no further
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 25

analytically. Instead we shall treat West Kennet as a specific location

at which a change in the reckoning of time became possible. At one
stage in its history five stone built chambers were situated at the end
of a long mound, and these contained the disarticulated skeletal
remains of a number of individuals. These remains were partial, and
some had been stacked in a relatively orderly manner at the back of
the chambers. The chambers themselves opened onto a gallery
entered through the center of a curving facade. Toward the end of the
3rd millennium BCE the chambers were infilled using a mixture of
chalk rubble, soil, and artifact debris. The infilling was accompanied
by a redesign of the facade with the erection of a line of massive
stones across and blocking the earlier appraoch to the entrance. The
chambers and old entrance were now effectively sealed.
Most accounts refer to these acts as if they were “final,”
where the blocking of the chambers marked the abandonment of the
tomb. It is an interesting argument, displaying all the logic of regard-
ing the monument as intended to fulfill a single function, and that
once that function was no longer possible the monument had simply
lost its purpose. The alternative is to recognize that the redesigning
was actually facilitating the redesigning of the acts and rites of access
and co-presence that were established between the living communi-
ty and the dead. This redesigning was not the abandonment or for-
getting of the monument and its contents; rather it was the displace-
ment of those contents and thus a displacement of the dead.
Physically separated and now also inaccessible the dead remained but
as if in another place out of reach of the contemporary world.
When this redesign of access was occurring, a new tradition
of mortuary activity was also emerging in the region. Classically
referred to as a single grave tradition, the burials involved dug graves
with the deposition of bodies, often flexed and accompanied by a
small set of artifacts arranged around the corpse (see Barrett 1994).
Traditionally this material has been taken to herald a process of social
change where the burial associations are assumed to reflect new lev-
els of status among an emergent social elite. What is overlooked is
26 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

that these graves are normally reopened and are used for a short
sequence of inhumations, sometimes with the additions of crema-
tions. Located as single and distinctive points in the landscape, the
graves therefore mapped unique sequences of relationships between
those included in the graves and relationships of close affinity or of
difference, depending upon their location, among those assigned to
neighboring or more distant plots.
None of this material belongs to the Middle Bronze Age,
that period in which we begin to see the clearest evidence for more
intensive agricultural systems and longer-lived settlements, all of
which may represent the changes in land tenure suggested by Earle.
None of this material seems to relate directly to agricultural practice
either. My argument is that these changes in the treatment of the
dead, often analyzed as a process of changing burial rites and indica-
tive of the emergence of social hierarchies, may have had an even
more profound historical implication. These mechanisms, the dis-
placement of the dead community and the sequential linking of
funerary rites to a lineage of earlier activities, may all have been
among the local and specific strategies by which it was possible to
formulate changes in the conceptions of temporality. These were not
so much intellectual advances as the practical realization that the
past, separated from the present, was also linked to it by the lineal
flow of time. Along this trajectory some mediation between the past
and present was possible, perhaps in funerary rites, but also perhaps
in terms of the transference of rites across generations which may in
turn have allowed clearer lines of tenurial rights to have been demar-
cated. If the Middle Bronze Age required these changes to have been
put in place, then it arose not as the planned but as the unintended
consequences of the temporal practices in the centuries that preced-
ed it.”

* The ideas expressed in this chapter have developed as part of a longer

working program I have undertaken with Stephanie Koerner, and I am grateful to her
for her continual force of argument and direction, without necessarily implicating her
in what appears here. Finally I must thank Cat Howarth for assisting in the final stages
of writing what had become a far more complex chapter than I had originally intended.
 TEMPORALITY AND THE STUDY OF PREHISTORY 27

References

Bailey, Geoff. “Concepts, Time-scales, and Explanations in

Economic Prehistory.” In Alison Sheridan and Geoff
Bailey, eds., Economic Archaeology: Towards an Integration of
Ecological and Social Approaches. Oxford: BAR
International Ser. 96, 1981, 97-117.
Barrett, John C. Fragments from Antiquity: An archaeology of social life
in Britain, 2900—1 200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Childe,V. Gordon. “The Bronze Age.” Past and Present 12
(1957):2-15.
Earle, Timothy K. Bronze Age Economies: The Beginnings of Political
Economies. Oxford: Westview Press, 2002.

Lyotard, Jean Frangois. The Postmodern Condition:A Report on

Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1984.
 SHAPING LIFE IN THE
LATE PREHISTORIC AND
ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS
Chris Gosden

T ime in contemporary Western thought is generally seen as a

quantity, its measurable properties and its scarcity seemingly
its most salient characteristics. To see time as a quantity is a
mistake, as we shall see, and although it can be seen as linear and as
divided into discrete units, this is just one set of conventions for
making time useful in a world where time is intimately linked to
money. For the (pre)historian measured time is also vital, but as a
tool and ordering device, not as an essential insight into the human
relationship with time. Time is shaped by the qualities of human
experiences and actions in the world. In turn, actions and experi-
ences differ from one culture to another so there are many, cultual-
ly based forms of time, not just one. We do not pass through time;
time passes through us. We shall first consider the qualities of human
involvement with the world, before examining a period at the end of
prehistory in Britain when new relationships with the world came
into being.
The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky was once condemned to
death by firing squad. Standing in a line of people being shot one by
30 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

one, he worked out how many minutes of life he had left and appor-
tioned his remaining time (using a nearby church clock) into several
minutes thinking about the wonder of the world, several minutes
thinking about his own life, and the last few minutes getting ready for
death. One of his thoughts in the later minutes was if he survived that
he would try to live his life at a similar level of intensity. He was
reprieved (a typical Tsarist trick which sent some people mad with
relief) and of course did not live the whole of his life with similar
intensity. Dostoyevsky’s work was a significant inspiration for the
existentialist movements of the 20th century, which focused on the
nature of human relationships with the world, especially alienation.
His, and their, point was that time contracts and dilates so that not
all minutes are equal in experience even though, by definition, each
60 seconds is the same when measured by a clock.
Dostoyevsky’s experience of time was a general human
experience of time ebbing and flowing pushed to a cruel extreme. If
all human life consists of periods of different length and impact of
experience, of hours that fly by unnoticed or minutes that creep, we
need to ask why these differences occur. Considering time more
broadly we become aware that many cultures have different means of
thinking and speaking about time: people who face the past with
their backs to the future; those who see time as moving in cycles
rather than in a linear fashion; the idea that ancestors and their
actions are both infinitely removed in time, but also present in the
contemporary world.
In a lucid and clear exposition of different conceptions of
time Gell (1992) concludes that although people represent time very
differently around the world, there is in fact only one time, which is
that of the Western physicist or time-and-motion expert, linear and
measurable. Gell’s view privileges representations and ways of talk-
ing about time, and this is valuable.
Cartographers have engaged in much useful study into the
history of map making, looking at the changing conventions used to
depict space. A similar exercise is needed charting the history of
 SHAPING LIFE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS 31

temporality—the changing conventions used to represent time.

However, there is always a complex relationship between represen-
tation and the manner in which temporality derives from the rou-
tines of life. Conventions of representation are not so much right or
wrong, but rather more or less useful, and this is as true for the ana-
lyst as it is when we are engaged in everyday life. Calendars and
radiocarbon years are vital devices for orienting ourselves, but they
do not give us vital clues as to the nature of times past and there is
always the danger that we will mistake the convention for the shape
of social time. Time is not one thing, It is many, and its multiplicity
derives from deep variations in human actions, thought, and feeling.
Life concerns attaching values to experience through mak-
ing valuations of people and objects and the links between the two.
Recent work on the emotions has striven to break the division
between thought and emotion by showing that emotions are means
of directing attention toward people and things in ways deriving
from human intention (Nussbaum 2002; Reddy 2001). In such
views, perception is not a passive act. It is both interested and direct-
ed; it is also linked to action. Love, hate, disgust, or compassion are
means of perceiving and conceiving of the world, of people and
things. Nussbaum argues that each of us learns in early childhood
various discriminations attaching to things—comforting, disturbing
or alienating—so each of us carries these discriminations through
life. Individually ‘our lives are complex in a temporal sense as pat-
terns of valuation and emotion created in early childhood are carried
through in the rest of our life, not mechanically enacted in all situa-
tions, but providing the basis for intelligent action within a cultural
framework, |
Elsewhere I have argued that our relationship with the
object world through our senses can be best understood in terms of
aesthetics, the sets of discriminations of taste that we apply to the
sensory qualities of objects and people (Gosden 2000). Aesthetics
and emotions are closely linked. The discriminations of taste we
make about the qualities of objects—their brilliance, dullness, or
32 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

intransigence when worked—evoke emotional responses in us

which give our evaluations force and social direction. Values derive
from a dynamic interaction between people and the sensory proper-
ties of objects, where people are culturally sensitized from early
childhood onwards to various properties and are much less aware of
others.
Perception is part and parcel of working in and on the
world, and such work always has a temporal dimension. Human
actions have complex sequences through the deployment of skills and
abilities. Working stone into a useable implement requires a
sequence of actions—the so-called chaine opératoire—to reduce a
large piece of stone to a smaller culturally defined tool. This
sequence derives from the blows administered by the human hand,
but also the flakeability of the stone and the dynamic interaction
between the two. The resulting tool may be pleasing by virtue of a
certain functionality, color and sheen, as well as an embodiment of
human skill and care.
Skill and care are temporally structured. As Ingold (1993)
has pointed out, working a landscape involves many different streams
of action and involvement, with different forms of temporality link-
ing, intertwining, or clashing (see also Gosden 1994), Climate, alti-
tude, and latitude all influence the seasons and other forms of change
within the landscape, so human skills and the inherent periodicity of
the landscape grow up together in complex mutual influence.
Recent work on kinship (Carsten 2000) has shown that the
patterns of relationship that are emphasized or ignored are due to
patterns of action and co-habitation. Close kin are likely to be those
with whom one lives and works, so the general rhythms and
sequences of life feed through into patterns of human relatedness,
which thus also has a temporal structure both within and across gen-
erations.
In many other areas of life, timing is all. Bourdieu (1990)
pointed out that time had been ignored in studies of gift exchange
which had focused most on what was given and to whom, When
 SHAPING LIFE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS 33

things are given is also vital: to return a gift too soon looks like a
refusal of the relationship; to act too late makes the relationship seem
unimportant. Judging the occasion and timing of a return gift is at
least as important to the style and impact of the transaction as decid-
ing what to give. Rivalries and attachments have their own forms of
timing. There are, of course, long-term forms of temporality. Old
sites in a landscape may be known through continuous memory of
them held in oral or written form. Their origins may be lost in the
mists of time, but invented anew through the creation of myth and
legend. Or they may be ignored altogether as irrelevant to the work-
ings of the contemporary world. Claims to land or legitimacy are
often made through links to earlier generations and the marks they
have left on the landscape. The Normans in Britain pursued the
opposite strategy, constructing large, stone churches on the sites of
smaller wooden Anglo-Saxon ones or positioning their castles for
maximum social, as well as strategic, effect.
Time has a stratigraphic element to it, ranging from deep
time embedded within the long-term use of the landscape and the
marks that previous generations have left on the landscape to the
individual stone-knapper sitting down for half an hour to make a flint
blade. Each of these forms of temporality is calibrated against the
average life span of the individual working out his or her social proj-
ects and the average life history of groups. Each social formation has
its own forms of temporality compounded of a range of times from
the everyday to the longest reach of history and myth. Different
forms of temporality may interact; daily life is partly linked to the
need to provision a longer term cycle of social exchanges and forms
of ritual, so different forms of time may flow well together or clash
discordantly. In all cases, time is not a neutral dimension of social life
but one that takes its values from a broader set of social values and is
a quality (or series of qualities) as much as a quantity.
As an example of how these rather abstract points can be
applied in practice, we may briefly examine one archaeological site
in southern Britain, occupied between the Iron Age and Romano-
34 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

British periods. The coming of the Romans has often been seen as the
imposition of foreign values on native British culture, more particu-
larly as the imposition of a Cartesian culture of rectangular buildings,
well-laid-out streets and roads, mass-produced material culture, and
a more orderly sense of time on a native consciousness less rational-
ized and regularized. This view is too simple, as there are complex
continuities as well as changes across the Iron Age-Romano-British
temporal boundary that divides prehistory from history.
“Romanization” is a contested term, but an emerging con-
sensus is that all members of the Roman Empire participated in the
construction of Roman culture, rather than having it imposed upon
them. The argument is best stated by Woolf (1998) in Becoming Roman
in Gaul, the title of the book reflecting the belief that Roman identi-
ty was a state of becoming rather than being. “Gauls were not ‘assim-
ilated’ to a pre-existing social order, but participated in the creation
of a new one” (Woolf 1997: 347).
Roman culture was an entity created anew in different parts
of the empire at different times, through the actions of all groups,
and it was not just native peoples who were being Romanized
through the expansion of empire, but also the Romans themselves. If
the Romanization of Britain concerned the use that was made of the
new cultural resources offered by the empire we should look at the
combination of existing social logics and the shape given them
through participation in the empire. Time being a vital element of
the social process as a whole provides us with a diagnostic of social
change, so the creation of time through shaping the landscape can
lead to an understanding of the novel qualities given to time after the
Roman invasion of 43 CE.
Landscapes are created through repeated human actions,
and the landscapes of prehistoric Britain were replete with signs of
human action. Ditches and pits were dug, banks and ramparts con-
structed since the Neolithic period. By the period we are examining,
which encompasses the late Bronze Age to the Romano-British peri-
od (the late Bronze Age lasts between roughly 1100 to 750 BCE, fol-
SHAPING LIFE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS 35

lowed by the Iron Age which ends with the Roman invasion in 43
CE), digging and mounding were ancient traditions but were start-
ing to be deployed in new ways. Large ditch systems, so-called linear
ditches, were constructed in many areas of Britain to divide territo-
ries for reasons that we do not clearly understand. The tradition of
constructing and maintaining linears lasted some thousand years
until the Romano-British period. Ditches such as these, the longest
of which stretch some 13 km, had not only to be dug, but also
cleared regularly as water and frost eroded their sides. These features
of the landscape may have names attached to them, perhaps of ances-
tral significance, and would have been part of the temporal round of
maintaining the landscape.
Beginning in the late Bronze Age hilltops came to be
enclosed, initially by relatively small ditches and banks, some of
which were later enlarged in the Iron Age to become what we know
as hillforts, with relatively massive ramparts and ditches which often
underwent alteration. Originally seen primarily as defensive sites, as
the name hillfort implies, these are now more generally viewed as
sites which make a statement in the landscape to help assert social
claims and to support power. I would also add that the effort of con-
structing these sites, the regular forms of maintenance, and work on
the sites were as important as their final forms. In some sites, such as
the famous Maiden Castle, there seems to have been regular small
alterations to the ramparts, due to the dumping of soil in small
amounts and it seems that the activity of construction may have been
as important as the end result (Sharples 1991). The sites of late pre-
historic southern Britain are often impressive features in themselves,
which look to us to be relatively static and enduring. This should not
blind us to the fact that it was actions of construction and reconstruc-
tion that may have been as important as their final form, the sites
requiring regular and repeated work, all part of the temporality of
the landscape.
The transition from the prehistoric to the Romano-British
landscape is often seen as due to the imposition of new forms and
36 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

changes in spatial sensibility. Roads, forts, and new towns created a

landscape of control, which emphasized military control in the early
days and the growth of trade and a healthy market as the province of
Britannia developed. It is often felt that people moved out of a pre-
historic world of circles or irregular lines into a more Cartesian
world of squares, rectangles, and straight lines in the Romano-British
period. As we shall see, this is only a partial truth. In order to address
these questions, albeit in microcosm, I shall look at one particular
site I have excavated together with Gary Lock, that of Alfred’s Castle
situated on the Berkshire Downs, part of the chalk downland that
stretches across much of southern England.
Alfred’s Castle, excavated over three seasons between 1998
and 2000, is a small earthwork enclosure of approximately hexago-
nal shape with an interior area of 1.2 ha (Figure 2.1). Surrounding
the enclosure is a series of linear ditches mapped from aerial photo-
graphic evidence which form an integrated system that utilizes the
contours of the local topography and is quite different from the field
systems which start just to the east of the site and stretch across the
Downs to the east. Integrated into the linear system is a larger enclo-
sure that joins the northern side of the smaller hillfort enclosure.
Central to an understanding of Alfred’s Castle is sequence
and the way that manipulating links to the past as a form of social
value appears to have influenced the development of the site. This
was elucidated through the excavation of 21 trenches in all, located
both within the small enclosure and around it (Figure 2.1). The ear-
liest extant features on the site are a pair of late Bronze Age ditches,
one to the west of the large and small enclosures (ditch I) and one to
the southern and eastern side of the small enclosure (ditch II).
Ditch I has been visible on aerial photographs for many
years and trenches 8 and 10 were positioned to explore it. Ditch 1
was a large flat-bottomed linear ditch approximately 2 m deep with
fills containing pottery of probable late Bronze Age date. Ditch I rep-
resents a late Bronze Age linear as known from elsewhere on the
Berkshire Downs. Trench 21 revealed that ditch I was cut by the
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38 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

enclosure ditch of Alfred’s Castle, ditchV, and that its end had been
packed with chalk where it was cut, presumably to give the appear-
ance of unbroken chalk along the side of the enclosure ditch.
Ditch II ran across the southern side of the site and was
investigated through the trenches in area C, it was relatively shallow,
but of the same flat-bottomed profile as ditch I. A terminus to the
ditch was discovered at its eastern end, where it reduced its width by
half, from 2 m to 1 m, and then ended. At its western end ditch II
was cut through by the enclosure ditch, ditchV, which made use of
the line of the earlier ditch but was much more massive than it. The
linear was again packed with clean chalk where the enclosure ditch
cut it, again presumably to give an appearance of an unbroken line of
chalk along the side of the enclosure ditch, as with ditch I. Although
we have no definite evidence, ditches I and II appear to have been
converging on the southwest corner of the small enclosure of
Alfred’s Castle. The line of these ditches was made use of in con-
structing the enclosure, although the enclosure ditch, ditch V,
enlarged the existing linears. Alfred’s Castle may have been con-
structed at a point in the landscape already picked out as significant
by the meeting of two linears.
Cut partially into the fill of ditch I and slightly to one side
of it was a smaller V-shaped ditch (ditch IV), approximately 1 meter
deep and recut at least once, following the line of the linear ditch
toward the small enclosure. Ditch IV was dug after ditch I had fully
silted up and could only have formed an ephemeral mark on the
landscape. Trench 10 contained an indication of a possible ring ditch
of an earlier barrow cut by ditch IV, and it may have been that the late
Bronze Age linear (ditch I) had been aligned on an earlier barrow at
this point.
On the eastern side of the site in area A a series of trench-
es was dug to reveal two and sometimes three ditches—called col-
lectively ditch III. At some points these were separate and sometimes
they cut each other, suggesting a number of phases of cutting, silting,
and recutting of ditches. The ditches were aligned on an earlier
 SHAPING LIFE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS 39

round barrow, partially excavated by us, before turning sharply west

along the modern fence line to join with the enclosure ditch of
Alfred’s Castle at its northernmost corner. At several points along
the ditches early Iron Age pottery was recovered, suggesting that
ditch(es) III were broadly contemporary with the digging of the
Alfred’s Castle enclosure ditch, which post-dates the linear ditches (I
and Il).
We thus have the following sequence, the earliest phases of
which are somewhat speculative, the later phases much more cer-
tain. The earliest features on this site were round barrows, two of
which may have been discovered through excavation and a third is
suspected from aerial photographic evidence. One of these barrows
may have been used to align the linear (ditch I) which came in from
the north and the other for the later V-shaped ditches which form the
eastern boundary of the large enclosure, ditch III. The Alfred’s Castle
enclosure was created at the point where two linears intersect and
was broadly contemporary with the V-shaped ditches forming the
large enclosure. The enclosure of Alfred’s Castle itself was created
through digging a V-shaped ditch, similar in profile to those men-
tioned above, but much deeper and steeper. Contemporary with this
ditch was dense occupation of the interior, evidenced by one possi-
ble house structure and a mass of pits and other features. The pits
contained rich assemblages of bronze and iron work, pottery, spin-
dles whorls, loom weights, and animal bones dating from the early
and the middle Iron Ages.
The structure of the rampart and the nature of the
entrances into Alfred’s Castle were explored through trenches | and
4. Trench 4 showed the break in the rampart on the western side of
the enclosure was an original entrance and the rampart here was in
two phases, with an original sarsen-faced rampart being supplement-
ed by a substantial chalk bank with revetting posts. There is a break
in the ditch in front of the gap in the rampart allowing movement in
and out of the small enclosure and connecting with the large enclo-
sure. The northwestern end of trench 1 showed that the rampart
40 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

here was substantially different in character and may have been only
of a single phase. It also demonstrated that the break in the rampart
was not original but had been made in the Romano-British period
with Romano-British pottery, hobnails, and other artifacts in the
upper fills of the ditch, together with substantial amounts of sarsen
stones, probably pushed down from the rampart to form a consoli-
dated surface.
Pits and postholes within the enclosure in trench 1 were also
filled with Romano-British material. This activity is related to the
building and use of a Romano-British villa house which was construct-
ed inside the small enclosure in the late 1st century CE, thus continu-
ing links to the past and extending the sequence of the site into the 3rd
century CE when the building was abandoned. Despite the name
Alfred’s Castle, there is no evidence of post-Roman activity at the site.
The main evidence of Romano-British occupation of
Alfred’s Castle is a stone building in the center of the enclosure
(Figure 2.2). This building was excavated over two seasons.
Excavations revealed the building to be relatively small and centrally
located within the enclosure and of a type which might best be
described as a “villa house” (Henig and Booth 2000:82, fig. 4.2). The
building was made up of six rooms, five of which were probably con-
structed in the late 1st or early 2nd centuries and the final one, at the
southwestern end, was a later addition, probably in the 3rd century,
not long before the building was allowed to collapse.
Walls 2005 and 2008 were constructed later than the outer
walls, to form new rooms, but probably are not much later in date.
The building lacked a corridor, although it is just possible that it was
originally an ailsed building, with internal divisions created slightly
later in its history. Two large sarsens at either ends of wall 2008
might have formed supports for the bases of posts.
Wall plaster and window glass were recovered, but there
was no trace of a mosaic pavement or a hypocaust, indicating that
although the building was a substantial stone structure, it was not
especially rich or well-appointed.
 A
‘
\
1 oN
1
8 i
\
Ditch Il \
(large enclosure)

s|
Ditch | @4
(linear) tt.

+c SS
7 ing ditch

AREA A of
oo ae

aft
Ditch V
ring ditch cy, (small enclosure}

eg

Ditch IV
(large enclosure) [°s
21

0 25 50 75 100
lame ————raessssseeel-—-—-| Metres

Figure 2.2 Plan of Alfred’s Castle.

42 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

There were a mass of Iron Age pits and other features under
the villa house, and where walls had been laid over pits their tops had
been filled with sarsen packing, indicating an awareness of the earli-
er features on the site on the part of the later inhabitants.
A number of ancillary structures was found in the area
around the house, made of sarsen and tile, some of which exhibited
evidence of craft and agricultural activities, such as a crucible found
in sarsen structure at the northern end of trench 5. The villa house
represented a local center of the agricultural economy, as well as
linking into the wider Roman world through buying a range of arti-
facts from both local and more distant parts of the Roman Empire.
In summary, the site of Alfred’s Castle provides evidence of
long-term, if discontinuous, use. From the alignment of late Bronze
linear ditches and early Iron Age V-shaped ditches on earlier Bronze
Age round barrows and the construction of the enclosure of Alfred’s
Castle along the line of two linear ditches, the creators of the site
have showed considerable awareness of the past. This awareness con-
tinued into the Romano-British period with the construction of a
substantial stone building in the middle of the enclosure, the creation
of a break through the rampart, and the filling in of the enclosure
ditch to create a new entrance. The new stone house, although mod-
est by the more general standards of Roman Britain, would have
been an obvious and visible statement on the Berkshire Downs and
we feel that it is no coincidence that this statement was made within
an earlier enclosure. Just as there was a break in time between the
construction of round barrows and the digging of the linear ditch, so
there was a gap between the early and middle Iron Age occupation of
the Alfred’s Castle enclosure and the late 1st century CE building.
This discontinuity makes the link with the past that the building sig-
nalled more intriguing rather than less.
The material world is an important source of emotions,
and the values we attach to people cannot be understood without
looking at the values deriving from the things that were important
to them. Repeated actions and links to the past through memory or
SHAPING LIFE INTHE LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS 43

myth evoke emotions linking childhood experiences to the world

of the present. The digging of ditches in late prehistory might seem
mundane and utilitarian acts to us but could have been an impor-
tant element of peoples’ emotional anchors to the world. Linking
older ditch systems to newer ones through the last millennium
BCE made claims on the past by those in the present. The whole-
sale re-attachment of people to things that took place as
Romanization unfolded was profound, if not sudden or imposed.
The fact that, in the case of Alfred’s Castle, new ways were adopt-
ed within a context where links to the past could be maintained and
emphasized is surely important. The building of a villa-house, prob-
ably the first in this area of rural Britannia, was not just a statement
made in stone of a new commitment to rectangular form, but the
center of new forms of commensualism and community. Food and
drink of novel types were consumed from fine and coarse pottery,
both imported from long distances and made relatively locally.
Window glass, coinage, and bronzes all indicate a new shape, qual-
ity, and dynamic to human relationships. The new villa was built on
an old site. The builders were not breaking with their past, but
reshaping it. Maybe they used links to Iron Age ancestry to damp
down the novelty of what they did and to deflect criticisms that
attach to the nouveau riche. Maybe the imposition of a rectangular
form on a round one emphasized the daring nature of what they
attempted. Maybe claims to Iron Age ancestry were fictive, or
never made. We cannot know.
But we can see that conscious choice was being exercised,
so the new qualities attached to life were nuanced through being sur-
rounded by ancient marks on the landscape. Links with the past had
little to do with quantity, as it is very unlikely that any reliable dated
accounts existed of the earlier history of Alfred’s Castle, stretching as
it did back a thousand years and more before the construction of the
villa. But the qualities of claims on the present made through links to
the past were vital, reinforcing the earlier point that we do not pass
through time; time passes through us.
44 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press,

1990.
Carsten, Janet, ed. The Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the
Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.

Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of

Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg, 1992.
Gosden, Chris. Social Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
———, “Making sense: Archaeology and Aesthetics.” World
Archaeology 33 (2000): 163-67.
Henig, Martin, and Paul Booth. Roman Oxfordshire. Stroud: Sutton,
2000.
Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of Landscape.” World Archaeology 25
(1993):152—73.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of the
Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the

History of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.

Sharples, Niall M. Maiden Castle: Excavations and Field Survey 1985—6

London: English Heritage Archaeological Report 19,
-1991,
Woolf, Greg. “Beyond Romans and Natives.” World Archaeology 28
(1997):339—-50.
—__—., Becoming Roman in Gaul. The Origins of Provincial Civilization in
Gaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
 SCHOLARLY CONCEPTIONS AND
QuUANTIFICATIONS OF TIME IN
ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA,
c./50—250 BCE
Eleanor Robson

: e owe many basic concepts and quantifications of time,

\ \ | from the twelve-month year to the sixty-second minute,
to the scholars of ancient Iraq. My aim here is not to
recount the teleological story of how those ideas moved through
time and space from them to us, but rather to explore time as it is
represented in scholarly writings of all sorts in the historical record.
I shall focus primarily on two bodies of evidence: one from the cities
of Ashur, Kalhu, and Nineveh, successive capitals of Assyria—north-
ern Iraq, in the region of modern-day Mosul—trom about 750 to
612 BCE; and the other from the Babylonian cities of Babylon and
Uruk, to the south of Baghdad, in around 500—250 BCE.
Assyria in the mid-8th to late 7th centuries was at the
height of its imperial power. It controlled almost all of the Middle
East (including Egypt for two short periods), from which it earned
phenomenal income, in both taxation and war booty. Much of that
wealth was invested in the upkeep, expansion, and replacement of
three urban centres in its heartland on the Tigris River. First and
46 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

foremost was Ashur, the historic religious and cultural capital of the
empire, after which its tutelary deity was named. In 879 BCE king
Ashurnasirpal II moved the political capital north to Kalhu, and just
before 700 Sennacherib relocated to Nineveh. Before these cities fell
to the Medes and the Babylonians as the empire collapsed in
614—612 BCE all three were the focus of lavish spending, particular-
ly on their temples and palaces—and on the personnel attached to
those institutions.
The Assyrian court comprised not only political and mili-
tary officials and advisers but also men of learning, ummanu, whose
fields of expertise were vast, ranging from religion to science, from
medicine to magic. These elite literati depended almost entirely, it
seems, on royal patronage to keep them in housing and employment,
creating a highly competitive atmosphere which drove intellectual
innovation as they fought among themselves for preferment. As the
rulers were particularly concerned with determining the gods’ will
by means of terrestrial and celestial omens, there were especially
strong motives to improve the predictability of key celestial events
(Leichty 1993; Brown 2000a:33—52). Lunar and solar eclipses were
particularly portentous for king and country. The scholars of celes-
tial omens held the title tupshar enuma anu ellil (“scribe of ‘When the
gods Anu and Ellil’”), after the first line of the major compilation of
omens, which ran to 70 or more tablets and is so vast that it still has
not been published in its entirety (Rochberg 2000; Hunger and
Pingree 1999:12—20, 32-50).
The sudden destruction of the scholars’ homes and work-
places has left us with their personal and official libraries of scholar-
ly works—some newly composed, some carefully copied from
ancient originals, some recast or commented upon (Pedersen
1998:132—65). They range from historical and historiographical
works to literary and mythological compositions, from hymns and
ritual instructions to medical and astronomical compendia. The
palaces have also yielded their reports to, and correspondence with,
their kingly patrons, giving unparalleled opportunities to compare
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BaABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 47

the written tradition with day-to-day praxis (Starr 1990; Hunger

1992; Parpola 1993; Cole and Machinist 1998).
All that comes down to us was written on clay tablets using
the highly complex cuneiform script, in the languages of Akkadian
(an indirect relative of Hebrew and Arabic) and Sumerian (which has
no known linguistic relatives). This cluster of writing practices had
been in use since the first urbanization of Iraq in the late 4th millen-
nium BCE, but they were by now on their way out of both spoken
and written currency. Aramaic, which was rapidly replacing them,
had the massive communicative advantage of an alphabetic script, but
from our perspective the insuperable disadvantage of perishable
media. Clay tablets, however, survive in the hundreds of thou-
sands—probably millions—so we are fortunate indeed that ancient
scholars continued to employ the traditional medium of cuneiform
scholarship.
The Assyrians may have considered themselves rulers of the
known universe but they were very conscious of their cultural
dependence on their southern: neighbor Babylonia, from which
almost all of their traditions, writings, and belief systems ultimately
stemmed. At times the Assyrian kings even ordered raids on
Babylonian libraries, bringing back cultural booty in the form of
cuneiform tablets.and Babylonian scribes in fetters (Michalowski
1999). Thus much of the contents of Assyrian scholarship was essen-
tially Babylonian.
The scholarly tradition seems to have been relatively unaf-
fected by the major political reconfigurations of the 610s and even
survived the Persian and Seleucid conquests of 539 and 330 BCE
more or less unscathed. This may have been because the Assyrian sys-
tem of court patronage had never extended to Babylonia, where
scholars were dependent on the stable institution of the city temple
rather than the fickle support of the current king. Indeed, scholarly
activity appears to have continued regardless of who was in power:
the will of the gods needed to be determined for the good of the
land, whatever the political circumstances.
48 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

From about 500 BCE onward scholarship at Marduk’s tem-

ple Esangila in Babylon and at Resh, the sanctuary of the sky-god Anu
in Uruk, was increasingly focused toward ever more sophisticated
mathematical methods for modelling celestial periodicities so omi-
nous phenomena were completely predictable (Rochberg 1993).
Just as earlier in Assyria, cuneiform scholarship was in the hands of a
few families of wealthy urbanites, who trained their own sons and
the sons of professional colleagues, who all traced their ancestry
back to famous scholars of centuries ago. While the title tupshar
enuma anu elli] was still used occasionally, the preferred professional
designations, which ran along familial lines, were ashipu (“incantation
priest”) and kalu (“lamentation priest”). In 3rd century Uruk two
families most heavily involved in quantitative methods of celestial
prediction were the Ekur-zakir family of ashipus, and the Sin-legi-
unninni family of kalus. The latter group even claimed descent from
the late 2nd millennium editor of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Beaulieu
2000). Cuneiform scholars were still active in Babylon in the 1st cen-
tury CE, and perhaps even two centuries after that (Sachs 1976;
Geller 1997).
How did the scholars of ancient Babylonia and Assyria con-
ceptualize the past, present, and future of their land? How did they
perceive the flow of time? Historians of astronomy have typically
depicted them as the first rational scientists of the Western tradition,
observing, quantifying, recording, and classifying in order to build
sophisticated mathematical models of time on a sound empirical
base. Philologists and literary historians, on the other hand, have
tended to focus on ancient constructions of the distant and genealog-
ical past. These apparently mutually exclusive concerns are more a
reflection of the narrow focus of each of Snow’s “two cultures” of
modern scholarship—the scientific and the humanistic—than of any
ancient reality (Snow 1959). The elite literati of Assyria and
Babylonia were the numerati too, and their writings show a much
richer, more complex, and at times confusing and contradictory,
understanding of time and temporality than earlier studies have
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 49

allowed. The approach adopted here may appear eclectic but it sim-
ply attempts to replicate the wide-ranging interests of the ancients
themselves.

Reconciling Real and Ideal Time

The great Epic of Creation enuma elish (“When Above”) was recited
on the fourth day of the akitu, or equinoctial festival, held on the
eleven days after the first new moon of the spring equinox at the
beginning of the year (Bidmead 2002). At the city of Uruk during
the Seleucid period it was held at the autumnal equinox, the mid-
point of the year. In Babylonia the god Marduk was both the focal
point of the festival and the hero and sole audience of the epic; in
Assyria it was Ashur. The equinoctial recital of the Epic was not only
a marker of passing time; it both described and initiated “the irrup-
tion of primordial—and hence dangerous or sacred—time in to
mundane time, an irruption that both threaten[ed] and enriche[d]
the cosmic order” (Sommer 2000:82). For on the day of the akitu
following its performance, Marduk’s temple Esangila was ritually
destroyed, purified, and rebuilt, symbolizing the abolition and
renewal of the whole cosmic order, with the person of the king at
its center, after which the king’s right to rule was reaffirmed by
Marduk (or Ashur) himself.
The Epic describes the creation of the world of the
gods, in which time passes unquantified, and the hero god’s
destruction of the forces of chaos and evil in the form of the
monstrous sea Tiamat. From her lifeless body he creates the
world in which human beings are to dwell. Thus chaos is always
immanent in the world, a constant counter-force to the orderli-
ness imposed by Marduk. In the sky he positions the heavenly
bodies and sets them in regular motion to define and structure
the year:
Figure 3.1 The god Marduk, tutelary deity of Babylon and hero of the Epic
of Creation, with his snake-dragon. The image is from the god’s own cylin-
der seal, carved from lapis lazuli and dedicated to him by a Babylonian king
of the 9th century BCE. From F H. Weissbach, Babylonische Miscellen.
Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903, fig. 1.
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 51

[Marduk] made the positions for the great gods.

He set up the stars in constellations, their counterparts.
He designated the year and marked out its divisions,
Apportioned three stars each to twelve months.
After he had patterned the days of the year,
He fixed the position of the Pole Star to mark out their courses,
So that none of them could go wrong or stray.
He fixed the positions of Ellil and Ea together with it.
(Tablet V:1—7; cf. Dalley 1989:255)

In other words, every one of the gods is represented in the

sky by a star. The stars are to rotate around the Pole Star—as indeed
they appear to do. Because for most of the northern hemisphere of
the earth’s surface the Pole Star is not directly overhead, the stars
that are nearest to it are always visible in the night sky throughout the
year, while the band of stars further away appear to rise and set over
the year, and there is another group, of southern circumpolar stars,
which are never visible in the northern night sky. Marduk chooses 36
of those stars in the middle band as chronological markers, three of
which are to rise in each month.
The evidence for this interpretation, which otherwise
might appear to be an over-reading of the Epic, comes from a genre
of scholarly compositions dating to the 1180s BCE and later,
whose ancient title was “Three Stars Each”—notice the intertextu-
ality—but are now more prosaically (and erroneously, for they are
not navigation aids) called “Astrolabes.” They consist of a month-
by-month listing, or sometimes a circular pictorial representation,
of constellations, stars, and planets which make their first appear-
ance, or heliacal rising, on the eastern horizon in each of the 12
30-day months of the ideal calendar (of which more below). The
horizon is divided into three sectors for this purpose: the Path of
Anu the sky-god (a band of about 35° around due east); the Path
of Ea, god of wisdom (to the south of the Path of Anu); and the
52 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Path of Ellil, father of the gods (to the north of Path of Anu). Each
“astrolabe” assigns a slightly different group of stars to each Path
(an example is given in Table 3.1).
Later astronomical works built upon this scheme, includ-
ing the widely attested two-tablet compilation of celestial informa-
tion now known as MUL.APIN (“Plough Star”), which reached its
final form by about 700 BCE but was still copied for centuries
after that (Hunger and Pingree 1989:271—77). We also see Marduk
closely associated with the Pole Star throughout the scholarly tra-
dition, for instance in Astrolabe B: “the red star which stands at the
rising of the south wind after the gods of the night have finished
their duties and divides the heavens: this star is the Pole Star,
Marduk” (section B, ii, 29-32; Horowitz 1998:159).
Marduk’s next act in the Epic of Creation is to create the moon,
giving it detailed instructions on how to demarcate the lunar month:

He made the crescent moon appear, entrusted night (to it)

And designated it the jewel of the night to mark out the
days.

“Go forth every month without fail as a crescent disc,

At the beginning of the month, to wax over the land.
You shall shine with horns to mark out six days;
On the seventh day the disc shall be half.
On the fifteenth day you shall always be in opposition, at the
mid-point of each month.
When the sun faces you from the horizon of heaven,
Wane at the same pace and form in reverse.
Always begin the day of disappearance close to the path of the sun,
And on the [. . .] of the thirtieth day you shall be in
conjunction with the sun a second time.”
(Tablet V:12—22; cf. Dalley 1989:256)
 TABLE 3.1 THE RISING STARS OF ASTROLABE B

Month Path of Ea Path of Anu Path of Ellil

| Nisannu Field Venus Plough

II Ayyaru Star s Scor pion Annunitu
ITI Simanu Jaw of the Bull Scales Snake
IV Du’uzu —— True Shepherd of Anu Panther Wagon
V Abu Arrow Old Man [...]
VI Ululu Bow Swallow She-goat
VII ss Tashr itu The Cty of Eridu [Lion] Wolf
VIII Arahsamnu Great Lady [Twins] Eagle
IX Kislimu Mad Dog Great Twins Pig
Xx Tebetu Mars Crab Jupiter
XI Shabatu Habasiranu Raven Fox
XII Addaru Fish Pole Star Southern Yoke

Sources: Astrolabe B, VAT 9416 (KAV 218), section B. The most recent
discussion of “astrolabes” is Hunger and Pingree (1999:50—63); see also
Horowitz (1998:154-66). For identifications of constellations and star
names, see Hunger and Pingree (1989:271—77).
Figure 3.2 A circular star map from Nineveh dividing the night sky into
eight and illustrating the most prominent constellations. From L. W. King,
Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, &c., in the British
Museum 33. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1912, pl. 10.
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 55

Only after he has set time in motion does Marduk create the natural
world itself and then mankind (Tablets V and VI; cf. Dalley
1989:255-67).
The Epic of Creation embodies two conflicting ways of mark-
ing present time: Marduk orders to the moon and the “three stars
each” to operate an ideal calendar of twelve 30-day months, making
a year of 360 days. But the real lunar calendar—in which each day
began at sunset, the start of each month was designated by the first
sighting of the new moon 29 or 30 nights since the last one, and the
year started with the new moon after the spring equinox—averages
just 354 days. And of course the solar year, at 365 1/4 days, is longer
than either. It was a major scholarly endeavor to keep the lunar cal-
endar in line with the solar year and to reconcile them both to the
ideal year that the gods had decreed. Shortfalls in the real calendar
were seen as a divine indicator of the real world’s shortcomings in
attaining godly standards of perfection. But the ideal calendar was
not only understood to have been divinely ordained by the god
Marduk: it was also administratively convenient. Temple records
from the city of Uruk in the late 4th millennium BCE are already
witness to a 360-day year of 12 30-day months, and this remained
the accounting norm throughout the 3rd millennium and beyond
(Englund 1988; 1991).
However, in reality about a half of the months of the year
were only 29 days long: in Babylonian parlance the first day of the
month was turru (turned back) instead of kunnu (firm) as it should
have been. Assyrian and Babylonian scholars expended much energy
and ingenuity in predicting month lengths, as witnessed by reports
to kings as well as collections of prediction rules (Brack-Bernsen
2002). Thirty-day months were considered much more auspicious
than their 29-day counterparts, as can be seen in the omens which
scholars to the Assyrian court typically associated with sightings of
the new moon (Beaulieu 1993). Compare the chief scribe Issar-
shumu-eresh’s upbeat assessment for a new month after 30 days: “If
the moon becomes visible on the Ist day: reliable speech; the land
56 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

will become happy,” with his more cautionary “If the moon becomes
visible on the 30th day: there will be frost, variant: rumour of the
enemy” (Hunger 1992:10—11).
Babylonian temples too needed to adjust their cultic cycle,
moving clothing ceremonies and animal sacrifices forward or back-
ward a day according to the length of the month (Beaulieu 1993;
Robbins 1996). Here, for instance, is a priest of the sun-god Shamash
in the 6th century city of Larsa writing to his superior (“father”) at
Eana in nearby Uruk: “Tablet of Shamash-idri to the administrator
my father. May Shamash and Bunene decree the well-being and
health of my father. We heard the report concerning the turning-back
of the (first) day. Shamash will be clothed on the 15th day (intead of
the 14th). May the lord send whatever (is needed) for (that) day. May
the lord (also) send a weaver and a clothes-washer” (NCBT 58;
Beaulieu 1993:77—78).
It was imperative that the temples retain the ideal calendri-
cal cycle of the gods in the face of the vagaries of real-world lunation
and that meant maintaining the rhythms of ritual whatever the pro-
fane reality.
Eleven days difference between the lunar and solar year also
required regular readjustment to keep the months in line with the
seasons and the new year in line with the spring equinox.
Intercalation, or addition of an extra month after the sixth or twelfth
month, was for most of Assyrian and Babylonian history carried out
on an ad hoc basis, by royal proclamation following scholarly advice.
Here the tupshar enuma anu ellil Balasi advises king Esarhaddon in
early 670 BCE on the need to intercalate: “Concerning the adding of
the intercalary month about which the king my lord wrote to me,
this is indeed an intercalary year. After Jupiter has become visible |
shall write again to the king my lord. I am waiting for it, but it will
take the whole month. Then we shall see how it is and when we have
to add the intercalary month” (Parpola 1993:42).
The astronomical compendium MUL.APIN contains two
simple schemes for intercalation, based on observing celestial phe-
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 57

nomena which should theoretically occur on or near fixed dates in

the ideal calendar, and adding an extra month when those phenome-
na occur a month too late, as Balasi describes (Hunger and Pingree
1999:75—-79). This unnamed Assyrian king, probably also
Esarhaddon, sends out notices to his provincial governors, presum-
ably at his scholars’ behest: “Order of the king to Zeruti (the city
governor) and to the clergy of the city of Der. I am well; you may be
content. Be informed that there will be an intercalary Addaru
(Month XII). Perform the festival and rites of my gods in a favorable
month” (Cole and Machinist 1998:4).
In the late 6th century intercalation became regulated not
by royal proclamation but by the close observation of lunar periodic-
ity. Starting in 527 BCE, during the reign of the Persian king
Cambyses, there were three successive eight-year intercalation
cycles to bring the spring equinox back into Addaru (Month XII)
instead of Nisannu (Month I), before the adoption in 503 BCE of a
fixed pattern of seven intercalary months every nineteen years,
which is often erroneously named after Meton of Athens, fl. c.450
BCE (Britton 1993:66—68; Bowen and Goldstein 1988). The emerg-
ing understanding of the precise relationship between days, months,
and years in 1st millennium Babylonia is surveyed by Britton (2002).
Babylonian chronology was based on regnal years. For
instance when the trainee ashipu Anu-aba-usur copied a commentary
on lunar eclipses from enuma anu ellil Tablet 20 for his father Iqisha
he dated it “Uruk, Ululu (Month X) day 3, year 2 of Philip, king of
the lands” (322 BCE) (W 22330; von Weiher 1983—98:IV, 162). If, as
was often the case, a new ruler came to the throne midyear, that
accession year continued to be named after the previous king, and for
dating purposes the new reign was deemed to start on the following
New Year’s Day.
It was not until the late 4th century BCE that a continuous
dating system was invented, which would allow future years to be
named and counted. The Seleucid Era officially began retrospective-
ly on New Year’s Day of the first regnal year of Seleucus I Nicator (3
58 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

April 311 BCE); year names now took the form “Year 97, Antiochus
was king (214-3 BCE)” (Hunger and Pingree 1999:xiii).The 19-year
intercalation cycle continued to be used. The units and arithmetical
models with which the scholars measured the passing of time are
well understood (Brown 2000b; Hunger 2001) even if the physical
means by which they did so are not (Brown et al. 1999-2000;
Fermor and Steele 2000).

Constructing the Past, Present, and Future

The distinction between the sacred, timeless past and quantifiable,

historical time was not limited to the particular context of the akitu
festival. It was also occasionally marked, for instance, in royal foun-
dation inscriptions which kings had ceremonially buried in the walls
of temples whose renovations they had sponsored. When in 679 BCE
Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, commissioned the rebuilding of E-shar-
ra, the god Ashur’s temple in the city of Ashur, he also acknowledged
the reconstruction work of earlier kings:

Ashur’s ancient temple, which Ushpia my (fore)father,

Ashur’s high-priest, had previously built, and which had
become dilapidated, and which Erishum, son of Ilu-shum-
ma, my (fore)father, Ashur’s high priest rebuilt: 126 years -
passed and it returned to dilapidation, and Shamshi-Adad,
son of Ilu-kabkabbi, my (fore)father, Ashur’s high priest,
rebuilt it. 434 years passed and that temple was destroyed
by fire. Shalmaneser, son of Adad-Nirari, my (fore)father,
Ashur’s high priest, rebuilt it. 580 years passed and the inte-
rior shrine, dwelling of Ashur my lord, the summit building,
the shrine of the kubu images, the astral deities’ shrine, the
god Ea’s shrine, had become worn out, dilapidated, and old.
(Ass A, III:16-41; Borger 1956:1—6)
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 59

It happens that Esarhaddon’s 13th century predecessor

Shalmaneser | also left five different versions of a foundation inscrip-
tion within the temple precinct and elsewhere in the city (Grayson
1987:109—237, A.0.77.1—5). Esarhaddon’s history (one surviving
exemplar of which even imitates it in deliberately archaizing script)
is an almost word-for-word copy of one of them:

When E-hursang-kurkura, the ancient temple, which

Ushpia, my (fore)father, Ashur’s high priest, had previously
built and which had become dilapidated, and which
Erishum, my (fore)father, Ashur’s high priest, rebuilt: 159
years passed and that temple returned to dilapidation, and
Shamshi-Adad, also my (fore)father, Ashur’s high priest
rebuilt it. 580 years passed and the temple and its sanctuary
were destroyed by fire. . . . 1 deposited my monumental
inscriptions and foundation documents. He who alters my
inscriptions and my name: may Ashur, my lord, overturn his
kingship and eradicate his name and his seed from the land.
(Grayson 1987:189 A.0.77.2 5—13, 21-24)

Esarhaddon’s only non-trivial emendations to Shalmaneser’s text are

the addition of his predecessors’ patronyms and the alteration of the
time spans between them (Table 3.2).
Assyrian court scribes were able to assign exact spans of
time to the past thanks to their system of naming each year after
a limmu, or eponym official, who was chosen annually according
to his status in the court hierarchy (Finkel and Reade 1995). The
date at the bottom of one copy of Esarhaddon’s foundation
inscription, for instance, reads “Du’uzu (Month IV), day 19.
Eponymy of Itti-Adad-aninu” (679 BCE). Lists of these limmus
were maintained for administrative purposes, and in addition
limmu officials often commemorated their year of office by set-
ting up stele by the side of the monumental roadway into the city
of Ashur.
 (6L9 *699-089) Uoppeylesy
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(ISLI-€181) pepy-tysueys
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(I8LI-€181) pepy-lysueys
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(0061—-6€61) UNYSTIG
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NOCQAVHUVSY] ANVI YASANVWTVHS JO SNOLLdIYOSN] NOILVOGNNOA
OLONIGUOOOY ATIW4AL SUNHSY JO ONIGTINGAY NAAMLAG SNVd§ AWIL Ce ATaV
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 61

Limmu lists are completely reconstructible as far back as 910

BCE and fragmentarily attested for two hundred years before that
(Millard 1994), while the so-called Assyrian King List records the
names and lengths of reign of kings of Ashur going right back to the
early 2nd millennium BCE and the days of “17 kings who lived in
tents” (Grayson 1980). The King List, whose three best-preserved
exemplars end with the reigns of Tiglath-pileser II (966—935 BCE),
Ashur-nirariV (754—745 BCE), and ShalmaneserV (726—722 BCE),
respectively, was compiled wherever possible from limmu lists; it
describes one group of early rulers as “total of 6 kings [whose names
occur on (?)] bricks, whose eponyms are destroyed.” According to
modern chronology Shalmaneser’s time spans (159 years, 580 years)
are much closer to modern consensus than Esarhaddon’s revisions of
them (126 years, 434 years). The second of those, however, appears
to be based on the Assyrian King List, composed on present evidence
some three centuries after Shalmaneser’s reign. It gives the total time
span between Shamshi-Adad I and Shalmaneser I as 421 years and 1
month plus the reigns of two kings whose lengths are missing from
the extant exemplars. Esarhaddon’s scholars, then, seem to have put
more weight on their own evidence-based quantifications of the past
than on the authority of ancient writings and were capable of rewrit-
ing the historical record accordingly.
No temporal quantifications are attached to the temple’s
supposed founder, Ushpia, who has left no traces whatsoever in the
archaeological or historical record except as the penultimate entry in
the enumeration of the “17 kings who lived in tents” at the start of
the Assyrian King List (Harper et al. 1995:37). The building inscrip-
tions of neither Erishum (Grayson 1987;19-—37, A.0.33.1—14) nor
Shamshi-Adad I (Grayson 1987:47—63, A.0.39.1,9,11) mention any
royal builder earlier than Erishum himself. Shalmaneser’s scholars
appear to have added Ushpia to the beginning architectural genealo-
gy, as an attested king from the primordial time before the quantifi-
able past, in order to imbue the temple with deep antiquity (Robson
2001).
Figure 3.3 The seven antediluvian sages were thought to have been half man, half fish.
This bas-relief was erected in the temple of Ninurta in Kalhu, c. 875 BCE, and is now in
the British Museum. Photograph by the author.
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 63

Scholarship itself was deemed to have been bequeathed to

mankind in the primordial past. Mesopotamian spells and incanta-
tions “creat[es] magic by harking back to a primeval time”
(Livingstone 1999:131). And according to the late 2nd millennium
Myth of Adapa and other sources, Ea, the god of wisdom, sent seven
semi-divine sages to the antediluvian city of Eridu in order “to dis-
close the design of the land” (line 2; Dalley 1989:184). Esarhaddon’s
son Ashurbanipal (668—27 BCE) recalls this tradition in one of his
own self-laudatory royal inscriptions:

I have learnt the skill of Adapa the sage, secret knowledge of

the entire scribal craft;
I observe and discuss celestial and terrestrial omens in the
meetings of scholars;
With expert diviners I interpret the liver, the mirror of heaven;
I solve difficult reciprocals and multiplications lacking clear solution;
I have read elaborate texts in obscure Sumerian and
Akkadian which is difficult to interpret;
] examine stone inscriptions from the time before the Flood.
(L4I 13-18; Streck 1916:254-6)

Thus distant antiquity was inherent in the concept of schol-

arship itself.
As Esarhaddon implies in his account of the reconstruction
of Ashur’s temple, there were considered to be ideal times for cer-
tain activities, and conversely ill-favored moments: “I felt danger, I
was afraid. I was negligent in renewing that temple. In the diviners’
wooden bowl the gods Shamash and Adad answered me a true yes:
they caused an omen to be written on a sheep’s liver for building that
temple, for the renewal of its inner sanctum” (Ass A III.42—-IV.6;
Borger 1956:3).
Esarhaddon requests his diviners to ritually induce an omi-
nous sign from the gods in the innards of a sacrificial sheep, confirm-
ing divine consent to his plans. But he could also have asked them to
Figure 3.4 A baru inspects the entrails of a the sacrificial ram, depicted on a bas-
relief from Ashurnasirpal II’s palace at Kalhu, c. 875 BCE, now in the British Museum.
Photograph by the author.
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 65

TABLE 3.3 FAVORABLE, UNFAVORABLE, AND DANGEROUS

OR EVIL DAYS OF THE MONTH OF DU'UZU

Day Ashur hemerology Nineveh-Babylon hemerology

7 Outbreak of fire Favorable day in the house:

favorable for the slave

18 Favorable for the [slave] __ Terror: hostility on the road

in his master’s house

19 Favorable for the king Favorable for the king

20 Unfavorable Unfavorable

21 [...] Favorable for the king

consult a hemerology, or ominous calendar. Many different

hemerologies are known, from the mid-2nd millennium BCE to the
Seleucid Period, enumerating the favorable (magru), unfavorable (Ja
magru), and dangerous or evil (Jemnu) days of the ideal year for car-
rying out particular activities, in patterns which vary slightly from
city to city according to local belief systems and traditions of trans-
mission (Labat 1939:40). Compare these two calendrically organ-
ized hemerologies for the days around 19 Du’uzu (Month IV), on
which the building inscription was written (see Table 3.3). The first
is from Ashur (Labat 1939) and the second known in copies from
Nineveh and Babylon (Labat 1941:24), but according to both of
them 19 Du’uzu was a day deemed to be “favorable for the king.”
There seems to have been general agreement between the
Ist millennium hemerologies, with the second half of the year being
most favorable, with an average of 16 favorable days a month com-
66 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT MODERN WORLD

pared to 11 in the first half. Neither are the gods’ good graces spread
evenly across the months: the 3rd day of the month was favorable
only twice a year, while the Ist, 15th, and 22nd of the month were
each favorable in 9 months out of 12 (Labat 1941:20—21). These 3
days are closely linked to the ideal lunar cycle as decreed by Marduk
in the Epic of Creation. The Assyrian royal hemerology is even called
enbu bel arhi (“New Moon, Lord of the Month”).
Independent of a day’s favorable or unfavorable aspect was
its dangerous or evil character, which was unchanging from month
to month. Early hemerologies counted 9 unfavorable days a month,
but by the period we are dealing with there were just 5: the 7th,
14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th. On these days almost all activity was for-
bidden by the gods, except those relating to mourning and penitence
(Labat 1939:44). It is striking that 4 of the 5 days are multiples of 7,
and can once again be related to the key moments of the lunar cycle:
the day before the full moon, the day before disappearance, and the
2 half-way points in between. It has also been suggested that the 19th
day acquired its dangerous character from that fact that it is 7 x 7 =
49 days since the last new moon (Labat 1939:45). In the Nineveh-
Babylon hemerology mentioned above, there were no favorable yet
dangerous days in the months of Simanu (Month III) and Abu (Month
V), yet in Tashritu (Month VII) and Shabatu (Month XI) all the dan-
gerous days were considered favorable. On average two or three days
a month were both favorable and dangerous at the same time.
Although no edition of enbu bel arhi has yet been published
(see Landsberger 1915; Livingstone 1999:137), there is a contempo-
rary royal menology, or list of ominous months for kingly activity,
which bore the title igqur ipush (“He Destroyed, He Built”). It exists
in two different versions, one ordered primarily by activity, the other
taking that same material and reordering it by month (Labat 1965).
Interestingly in the light of Esarhaddon’s concern over Ashur’s tem-
ple, the first 33 sections of the first version all concern the founda-
tion and restoration of temples and cultic objects:
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 67

If in Nisannu (Month J) he builds a temple: its foundations

will not be stable
If in Ayyaru (Month II), ditto: he will see evil
If in Simanu (Month III), ditto: joy
If in Du’uzu (Month IV), ditto: his temple will last
If in Abu (Month V), ditto: his heart will be content.
(Labat 1965:63)

The section on Du’uzu (Month IV) in the version ordered

by month has not survived, but it will have conveyed the same mes-
sage: that Du’uzu is a favorable month for building.
It may simply be coincidence that Esarhaddon’s building
inscription was dated to a day deemed favorable for royal construc-
tion activities, but there is further evidence that menologies and
hemerologies did not sit idle on the library shelves. Neo-Assyrian
barutu (liver omen) rituals and reports were never performed and
written on the days forbidden by enbu bel arhi, with just one excep-
tion. Outside the immediate cultic context of the royal court, the
dates of contemporaneous legal documents from Nineveh, Kalhu,
and Ashur do not follow the hemerologies so strictly. Nevertheless
there seems to have been a clear preference for the 1st and 20th days
of the month as propitious times to enter into contracts, and an
avoidance of the 2nd, 8th, 19th, 24th, and 28th—30th days
(Livingstone 1993).
Nearly twenty letters to Assyrian kings from their scholars
attest to the regular use of menologies and hemerologies. Here the
tupshar enuma anu elli] Nabu-ahhe-eriba writes to king Esarhaddon in
Addaru (Month XII) of 670 BCE: “Concerning the arrangement of
the banquet about which the king, my lord, wrote to me—(accord-
ing to the menologies) ‘If he wants to take the cult ceremonies’
—it
is favorable this month. It is favorable to arrange the banquet. Let
them arrange it on the 13th, 15th, or the 17th day” (Parpola
1993:70).
68 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

In this letter the ashipu Nabu-nadin-shumi countermands

the king’s orders with the authority of the hemerologies behind him:

Concerning the apotropaic namburbu ritual against evil of

any kind, about which the king, my lord wrote to me,
“Perform it tomorrow”—the day is not favorable. We shall
prepare it on the 25th and perform it on the 26th.

Anyway, the king, my lord, should not worry about this por-
tent. The gods Bel (Marduk) and Nabu can make a portent
pass by, and they will make it pass by the king, my lord. The
king, my lord should not be afraid. (Parpola 1993:141)

The Assyrian king’s life was thus shaped and controlled by

the patterns of the ominous calendar. His actions were monitored,
sanctioned, and temporally constrained by his scholars, who imposed
their own individual readings of ominous portent on the person of
the king and thereby on the state as a whole. But if there were thus
limits to royal power, there were even greater restrictions on the
scholars’ influence over the king. There was intense competition
between them for royal attention—Balasi and Nabu-ahhe-eriba were
in particularly acrimonious dispute (Brown 2000a:240)—and the
king could dispense with their services at will (Parpola 1987). As the
second paragraph of Nabu-nadin-shumi’s letter shows, scholars did
much to support the king and to diffuse the load of decision making.
The mechanism of requesting divine sanction for royal action by
means of observing or inducing omens enabled the king to shift the
burden of responsibility onto the shoulders of the gods, but it was,
as we shall see, a negotiable process. The scholars had the means to
persuade the gods to reverse their decisions if they were felt to be
unfavorable to the king or land.
Esarhaddon’s inscription commemorating the recon-
struction of Ashur’s temple depicts the king and his commission
within a temporal continuum. Not only does the scholarly author
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 69

take care to represent the architectural history of the building

accurately, complete with revised positioning of previous acts of
rebuilding within the quantified past; he also chooses an apposite
propitious day in the present to mark the new enterprise. Further,
he is able to imagine the process of building (already attested three
times in the past and once in the present) iterated in the future.
He has the king address posterity with these words: “I made mon-
uments and inscriptions and I wrote on them the deeds I had done.
For later kings my sons, I left them behind forever. May the kings
my descendants, whose name Ashur calls for the lordship of the
land and the people, see my monument and anoint it with oil,
offer a libation, and return it to its place” (Ass A, VII.35—VIII. 13;
Borger 1956:6).
Just as Esarhaddon has respected the writings and deeds of
his predecessors, future generations should venerate his. There is no
sense here that time might come to an end; rather, Ashur and Assyria
will endure in perpetuity and so will Esarhaddon’s monuments,
ensuring that his good name lives on for future generations. There is
no hope for bodily immortality, but one’s reputation may live forev-
er in the collective memory. This is one of the many morals of the
Epic of Gilgamesh: although Gilgamesh fails in his quest to attain eter-
nal life, he is immortalized both through his monumental building
works in the city of Uruk and through the enduring appeal of the Epic
itself (George 1999).

Time’s Arrow: Negotiating the Future

For kings to be able to represent their good and magnificent deeds to

posterity they must earn the continuing support of the gods, by
ensuring their actions did not run counter to the gods’ desires. The
gods could reveal their intentions for the world and the state in one
of two ways. Specialist diviners could perform rituals to induce
revealed omens in the entrails of sacrificed sheep and goats, as allud-
70 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

ed to by Esarhaddon above. A manual of extispicy described the rit-

uals to be performed (Starr 1983). The scholars formulated the
king’s question and laid it before the sheep or (later) wrote a report
to the king after the outcome had been determined (Starr 1990).
Possible deviations from the normal configurations of the
animals’ innards and their ominous significance were systematically
recorded and commented upon in a long treatise called barutu
(“Extispicy”) (Koch-Westenholz 2000). Here, immediately after
Esarhaddon’s death, the crown prince Ashurbanipal asks the sun-god
Shamash whether his twin brother should be crowned king of
Babylon in the spring akitu festival:

I ask you Shamash great lord whether Shamash-shumu-ukin,

son of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, should within this year
seize the hand of the great lord Marduk in the Inner City (of
Ashur) and lead Bel (= Marduk, to Babylon), whether it is
pleasing to the great lord Marduk, whether it is acceptable
to the great lord Marduk.

Be present in this ram, place in it a firm and positive

answer, favorable designs, favorable and propitious omens by
the oracular command of your great divinity, and may I see
them. May this query go to your great divinity, O Shamash
great lord, and may an oracle be given as an answer.
Nisannu (Month 1), day 23, eponymate of Mari-larim (668
BCE). (Starr 1990:262)

It was also possible to read the gods’ intentions by observ-

ing and deciphering the very configuration of the land and sky and
even the bodies and behaviors of individuals: that is, in the world as
Marduk created it. The omens relating to observable portentous phe-
nomena on earth were collected together into four standard series,
just as enuma anu elli] and barutu comprised the omens of the sky and
the entrails of sacrificed animals. The terrestrial omen series was
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72 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

called shumma alu (“If a City”) (Freedman 1998), the teratological

(birth) omen series shumma izbu (“If an Anomalous Birth”) (Leichty
1969), the physiognomic omen series alamdimmu (“Physique”) (Bock
2000) and the diagnostic omens shumma ashipu (“If an Incantation
Priest”) (Heessel 2000). As a 7th century catalogue of celestial and
terrestrial omen series, the Babylonian Diviner’s Manual, explains: “the
signs on earth just as those in heaven give us signals. Sky and earth
both produce portents: though appearing separately they are not
separate: sky and earth are related (Il. 38-40; Oppenheimer 1974).
The catalog ends with complicated instructions on how to
confirm or refute the validity of an omen by checking its date and
time of day in a simple menology (Williams 2002).
Deviations in celestial motion from the ideal calendrical
periodicities were considered particularly ominous as they indicated
real-world slippage from ideal time. To this end, scholars kept obser-
vation records of lunar eclipses from the mid-8th century BCE, and
later many other lunar, solar, and planetary phenomena, in so-called
astronomical diaries, the latest of which is dated to 10 BCE (Sachs
and Hunger 1988; Steele 2001). They soon discovered that lunar
eclipses were possible (though not always visible) every six months,
or sometimes every five, and that solar eclipses can occur 14—15 days
before or after a lunar eclipse possibility. Such events were consid-
ered dangerous even when they were on schedule, but the omen
series show that occurrences at unexpected times were an indication
that the world was abnormally out of kilter with expectations. The
ominous import of the timing of eclipses was covered in Tablet 19 of
the celestial omen series enuma anu ellil; for instance: “If a lunar
eclipse occurs on day 21 (of Tashritu = Month VII), and it sets dur-
ing its eclipse: they will take the crowned king from his palace as a
captive” (section III 13; Rochberg-Halton 1988:171).
Scholars would keep watch and report back to the king on
the exact details of each celestial event and its ominous import, as
exemplified here by the tupshar enuma anu ellil Nabu-ahhe-eriba’s let-
ter to Esarhaddon in Nisannu (Month I) 667 BCE: “Good health to
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 73

the king, my lord. It is a dark day today, so I did not include a bless-
ing. The eclipse moved from the east and settle over the entire west.
Jupiter and Venus were present during the eclipse until it cleared.
For the king my lord all is well; it is evil for Amurru. Tomorrow |
shall send the king my lord a written report on this lunar eclipse”
(Parpola 1993:75).
Because the eclipse pointed westward its influence would
be felt in Amurru, to the west of Assyria, and once more the king and
country were safe. If, however, the eclipse should unequivocally por-
tend ill for Assyria itself, fate had to be averted. A substitute king was
crowned and while the real king was ritually purified with lengthy
and complicated ritual called bit rimki (“Bath House”) (Laessoe 1955;
Borger 1967). Here the Babylonian scholar Mar-Issar reports in
Ululu (Month X) 671 BCE on the successfully averted evil of a lunar
eclipse to Esarhaddon, who underwent bit rimki at least four times in
his eleven-year reign: “The substitute king, who on the 14th sat on
the throne in Nineveh and spent the night of the 15th in the royal
palace, and on whom the eclipse took place, entered the city of
Akkad safely on the night of the 20th and sat upon the throne. I made
him recite the scribal recitations before the sun-god Shamash, he
took all the celestial and terrestrial omens on himself, and ruled all
the countries. The king, my lord, should know this” (Parpola
1993:351).
Sometimes, however, eclipses were not observed as pre-
dicted, but that did not necessarily mean that there was no danger.
Either a positive sign of temporal normality was needed, or the full
period of danger had to be endured, as Adad-shumu-usur here
explains to Esarhaddon in 669 BCE: “As regards the substitute king
about whom the king, my lord, wrote to me: ‘how many days should
he sit on the throne?’, we waited for a solar eclipse, (but) the eclipse
did not take place. Now, if the gods (i.e., sun and moon) are seen in
opposition on the 15th day, he could go to his fate on the 16th. Or if
it suits the king, my lord, better, he could (as well) sit the full 100
days” (Parpola 1993:220).
74 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Omens, then, had expiration dates. But evil omens, it

appears, did not necessarily have to be dodged by deflection onto
another target. The gods could be persuaded to change their minds
and to rewrite the great lapis lazuli Tablet of Destinies, on which they
recorded their plans for the future of the supernatural and natural
worlds. Its power is outlined in the Epic of Creation by evil chaos
Tiamat as she gives it to her lover Qingu:

Then she gave him the Tablet of Destinies and made him
clasp it to his breast.
“Your utterance shall never be altered! Your word shall be
law!” (Tablet I, 157-58; Dalley 1989:238)

The idea is further elaborated in the Epic of'Anzu, in which the epony-
mous anti-hero, a monstrous lion-eagle, steals the Tablet of Destinies
from his godly master Ellil as he is relaxing in the bath:

“I shall take the gods’ Tablet of Destinies for myself

And gather to myself all the responsibilities of the gods
I shall possess the throne and be master of the rites!
I shall direct every one of the Igigi-gods!”
He plotted opposition in his heart
And at the chamber’s entrance from which he often gazed,
he waited for the start of day.
While Ellil was bathing in the pure waters,
Stripped and with his crown laid down on the throne,
He gained the Tablet of Destinies for himself,
Took away the Ellil-power. (Tablet I; Dalley 1989:207)

The gods are powerless without the Tablet, and Anzu is in com-
plete control of the destiny of the world. Several gods refuse the
challenge of combating Anzu, until the warrior-god Ninurta rises
to the occasion. The two foes engage in a mighty cosmic battle.
Anzu, with the Tablet of Destinies in his possession, is able to
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76 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

reverse the flow of time, temporally deflecting all attempts to kill

him by returning the constituent parts of Ninurta’s arrow to their
original states:

[Ninurta] set the shaft to the bow, drew it taut,

Aimed the shaft at him from the bow’s curve.
But it did not go near Anzu: the shaft turned back.
Anzu shouted at it, “You, shaft that came:
Return to your reed thicket! Bow-frame: back to your copse!
Bow-string: return to the ram’s gut! Feathers: return to
the birds!”
He was holding the gods’ Tablet of Destinies in his hand,
And they influenced the string of the bow: the arrows did
not come near his body.
Deadly silence came over the battle, and conflict ceased.
Weapons stopped and did not capture Anzu amid the mountains.
(Tablet II, 59-69; Dalley 1989:214)

Eventually Ninurta is forced to find more cunning means to out-

wit his opponent and return the Tablet of Destinies to its rightful owner.
If the scholars could not persuade the gods to turn back the
clock——in any case this was an abuse of the Tablet of Destinies—they
could at least convince them to rewrite the future before it had hap-
pened. There were two methods for doing this. On the one hand
there were namburbu incantations and rituals for removing evil, espe-
cially those portended by omens from the terrestrial series shumma
alu and shumma izbu, which took the form of a trial, in front of three
gods, of the supposed harbinger of evil (Maul 1994, 1999). Nabu-
nadin-shumi delays such a ritual in his letter to Esarhaddon quoted
above. There were also the kalutu rituals and laments, performed by
the kalu lamentation priests during dangerous periods, in order to
persuade the gods to let portended evil pass by. A legal record from
Uruk in c.530 BCE, during the reign of the Persian king Cyrus,
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 77

describes the public performance of a kalutu ritual in the nearby city

of Larsa: “On Simanu (Month III), day 13, year 8 of Cyrus, king of
Babylon, king of the lands, after sunset, the kalus of the E-babbar
temple played the copper kettle-drum at the gate of the E-babbar
and declared, “Eclipse!’, and all the inhabitants of Larsa saw with us
the playing of the copper kettle-drum” (Beaulieu and Britton
1994:74, 17-22),
But it becomes clear from a related legal deposition, made
by the chief kalu Shamash-tabni-usur of the Sin-leqi-unninni family,
that the kalus had undertaken this performance without consulting
their superiors at Uruk, and that the predicted eclipse did not in fact
take place (Beaulieau and Britton 1994). The mismatch between pre-
diction and actuality may have been one of the factors behind the
reform of the intercalation cycle discussed above, instituted just a
few years later in 527 BCE.
The Sth and 4th centuries saw a rapid growth in the schol-
ars’ power to predict ominous celestial events (Britton 1993). The
corpus of astronomical diaries now amounted to several centuries of
data, enabling even the longest planetary periodicities to be identi-
fied and described. The 5th-century invention of the zodiac as a
celestial reference grid encouraged more accurate observations and
predictions, but also had non-astronomical consequences. For
instance, an elaborate calendrical scheme developed in the 5th cen-
tury BCE that associated particular incantations and medical ingredi-
ents with each day of the ideal year. The so-called Kalendertexte
scheme depended on a complex temporal relationship in which
each of the twelve zodiacal signs is further subdivided into twelve
“micro-signs.” That in turn is intimately related to an idealised arith-
metical scheme for representing lunar motion throughout the ideal
year now called the Dodekatemoria (Brack-Bernsen and Steele,
2003). Even scholarly medical theory, then, was imbued with the
idea of temporality.
The development of fully mathematical theoretical astron-
omy culminated in the late 4th century BCE. In Babylon at Marduk’s
78 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

temple Esangila the Mushezib family and others were closely associ-
ated with one style of predictive model, now called System A, while
at the Resh temple in Uruk the Ekur-zakir and Sin-leqi-unninni fam-
ilies favored the scheme now known as System B (Neugebauer
1955). Both involved the tabulation of a mass of complex calculated
data into ephemeredes, or predictions of the lunar, solar, and plane-
tary positions for the coming year(s), computed according clearly
laid out procedures. But still the rituals to avert the evil of an eclipse
were performed. Predictable events were no less ominous; indeed it
appears that their very predictability led to the performance of more
elaborate apotropaic rituals than before, as one could now be sure
that the expense would not be wasted (Brown and Linssen 1997).
Lunar eclipse rituals from 3rd century Uruk involved massive public
spectacle with drums, wailing, and the singing of Sumerian balang
and ershema laments (Cohen 1988; Black 1991):

On the day of the lunar eclipse they will bring the bronze
halhallatu drum, the bronze manzu drum, and the bronze
kettledrum from the storehouse. . . When the lunar eclipse
begins, the kalus will put on linen garments. . . They raise
lamentations, wailing, and mourning towards the moon in
eclipse. ...

When the appearance of the eclipse is as one third of a disc,

“The bull in its fold” is performed. They join in with
“Mermer, a storm, who consumes life.” The ershema is
“Woe, he it is who has destroyed my abzu!” When the
appearance of the eclipse is as two thirds of a disc, “The bull
in its fold” and “Ah, woe is your heart” are performed. The
ershema is “Woe, he it is who has destroyed my abzu!” They
join in with “Mermer, a storm, who consumes life.” . . .

When the eclipse has cleared, they will leave the bronze
kettledrum; they will leave the magic flour circle and the
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 79

kukkubbu-jar of [tamarisk] tears and cast the rest into the

: *
river.

The scholarly tablets of the Sin-leqi-unninni family of kalus

in 3rd-century Uruk include almost as many examples of apotropa-
ic kalutu as they do mathematical predictive astronomy (Robson,
forthcoming:chapter 9). Even Alexander the Great underwent the
substitute king ritual in Babylon some time in the 320s BCE, as
recounted in a rather garbled fashion by Plutarch in his Life of
Alexander:

On another occasion Alexander took off his clothes for

exercise and played a game of ball. When it was time to
dress again, the young men who had joined him in the game
suddenly noticed that there was a man sitting silently on the
throne and wearing Alexander’s diadem and royal robes.
When he was questioned, he could say nothing for a long
while, but later he came to his senses and explained that he
was a citizen of Messenia named Dionysus. He had been
accused of some crime, brought to Babylonia from the
coast, and kept for a long time in chains. Then the god
Serapis had appeared to him, cast off his chains, and brought
him to this place, where he had commanded him to put on
the king’s robe and diadem, take his seat on the throne, and
hold his peace. When he had heard the man’s story,
Alexander had him put to death, as the diviners recom-
mended. (73—74; trans. Scott-Kilvert 1973:330—331)

* BM 134701, lines 1’-4’, 7’-10’, 15’-16’ (Brown and Linssen

1997:160—62). None of the three eclipse ritual tablets from Seleucid Uruk is dated, but
Seleucid tablets of different kalu rituals from Uruk date from 289 and 230 BCE (AO
6472 and Ist O 174, Thureau-Dangin 1921:34—45) and 200, 176, and 165 BCE (van Dijk
1980:nos. 5, 6, 12). These latter tablets were excavated in the god Anu’s temple, Resh.
80 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Thus the coming of “scientific’—rather, quantitative—

astronomy as a means of reliably predicting future celestial events did
not annul their power as signs from the gods about their intentions
for the terrestrial world.

The Temporal Order

How justifiable is it to examine this broad chronological and cross-

generic sweep of evidence? I stated at the beginning that such an
eclectic approach was typical of the scholars themselves. To demon-
strate this, we shall look briefly at the contents of two scholarly
libraries from the period under discussion. The temple library of
Nabu, god of scholarship, in the Assyrian city of Kalhu was active
over the 8th and 7th centuries BCE (Wiseman and Black 1996:4).
Thirty of its three hundred tablets preserve colophons, some of
which bear the names of an 8th-century family of royal ashipus while
others bear the name of the scribe Nabu-zuqup-kena of the Gabbu-
ilani-eresh family, who followed the royal court to Nineveh when it
moved there in 705 BCE. Among its holdings were tablets from the
standard terrestrial, celestial, teratological, diagnostic, and physiog-
nomic omen series; the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN;
hemerologies and menologies; apotropaic namburbu incantations and
rituals; the Epic of Creation and the Epic of Gilgamesh; and royal inscrip-
tions of the 9th to 7th centuries BCE.”

* In detail: 2 tablets of the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN (“Plough

star”); 23 tablets of the celestial omen series enuma anu ellil (“When the gods Anu and
Ellil”); 14 tablets of the terrestrial omen series shumma alu (“If a City”); 7 tablets of the
teratological omen series shumma izbu (“If an Anomalous Birth”); 4 tablets of the menol-
ogy iqqur ipush (“He Destroyed, He Built”); 6 tablets of hemerologies; 4 tablets of the sac-
rificial divination series barutu (“Extispicy”) and 1 divinatory model of a sheep’s lung; 3
tablets of the diagnostic omen series shumma ashipu (“If an Incantation Priest”) and 1 cat-
alogue of the series; 6 tablets of physiognomic omens; 10 tablets of apotropaic namburbu
incantations; 1 tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh and 2 tablets of the Epic of Creation; over 50
tablets of incantations and associated rituals; and an unknown number of royal inscrip-
tions from the reigns of Shamshi-AdadV to Ashurbanipal (823-627 BCE) (Wiseman and
Black 1996).
 TIME IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, C.750—250 BCE 81

At the other end of the geographical, chronological, and

contextual span of this chapter is the private library of the ashipu
Igisha of the Ekur-zakir family in Uruk. He left in his house nearly
250 scholarly compositions, household legal records, and school
exercises. Thirty identifiable scholarly tablets, dated to the period
322-317 BCE, bear his name. They include tablets from almost all
the standard series of omens, and commentaries on them; zodiacal-
medical Kalendertexte; other astrology; apotropaic incantations and
rituals.* Other tablets in the library not directly attributable to Iqisha
himself include many more examples of the same types of composi-
tion, as well as lunar and planetary ephemeredes, hemerologies, and
menologies, the Epic of Gilgamesh; kalutu, namburbu, and bit rimki
incantations and rituals.T
In other words, the professional interests of both Igisha and
the Nabu temple scholars covered almost exactly the range of text-
types discussed here. All that is missing are the equinoctial ckitu rit-
uals which, however, are known from 8th century Ashur and Nineveh
and 3rd century Uruk as well as ist millennium Babylon (Cohen
1993:420—53). Taking into account the fact that some compositions,
such as MUL.APIN (“Plough Star”) fell out of favor, while others,
such as the Kalendertexte and the mathematical astronomical texts,
were post-Assyrian inventions, the contents of the two libraries are

* In detail: 2 tablets of the calendrical scheme known as Kalendertexte, for

Months IV and VIII; 3 tablets of quantitative astrology; 2 tablets with commentaries on
the celestial omen series enuma anu ellil (“When the gods Anu and Ellil”); 4 tablets of the
terrestrial omen series shumma alu (“If a City”); 2 tablets of commentaries on the terato-
logical omen series shumma izbu (“If an Anomalous Birth”); 1 tablet of the diagnostic
omen series shumma ashipu (“If an Incantation Priest”); 2 tablets of the sacrificial omen
series barutu (“Extispicy”) and commentaries; 9 tablets with series of incantations and
associated rituals (Hunger 1976; von Weiher 1983-98). Findspot information in Hunger
(1972) and von Weiher (1979).
T In detail: 2 lunar and planetary ephemeredes and 3 other astronomical
works; 3 or 4 tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh; 2 tablets of hemerologies; 3 tablets of the
menology igqur ipush (“He Destroyed, He Built”); 4 tablets of namburbu rituals to avert
evil omens; 3 tablets of the series bit rimki (“Bath House”) for the substitute king ritual;
1 tablet of the standard series associated with lamentation priests, kalutu; 1 tablet with a
fragment of a royal inscription (Hunger 1976; von Weiher 1983—98). Findspot informa-
tion in Hunger (1972) and von Weiher (1979).
82 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

remarkably similar. While some scribal circles, families, and individ-

uals had particular interests and preferences, the scholars shared and
developed a large body of knowledge and conceptions about time.
Issues of temporality permeated almost all aspects of schol-
arly endeavor, from medicine to divination, from literature to astron-
omy. The centrality of lunar cycle was affirmed and strengthened
each new year with the performance of the Epic of Creation, in which
creation, destruction, and renewal were prominent themes. The
scholarly view of time as favorable or unfavorable, dangerous or safe
dictated their patterns of professional activity and deeply influenced
the timing of matters of state. Not only were royal events fixed
according to the scholarly calendar but also great outlays of wealth
and specialist personnel were expended on matters temporal.
Enormous and elaborate public rituals, from akitu to bit rimki, nam-
burbu, and kalutu, were each designed, in their different ways, to con-
trol and manage present and future time.
The constant intellectual battle to reconcile the ideal 360-
day cycle of lunations with the solar and lunar years was a major driv-
ing force behind the development of observational astronomy in
Assyria and Babylonia. Successive generations of scholars cooperated
to produce a massive body of data and theory to describe and predict
the motions of the heavenly bodies and thus unwittingly laid down the
foundations on which the modern scientific concept of time is based.”

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 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN
CLASSICAL INDIA
Ludo Rocher

he belief that the present world and its inhabitants exist in an

| age of privation and distress is not unique to India, nor is the
expectation that this situation is only a temporary one, that it
degenerated from earlier better ages, and that better ages, including
the ideal age, will return (Meyer 1922; Eliade 1959). Nowhere,
however, is this belief as omnipresent and as elaborately developed as
in India. It is still referred to in traditional Indian calendars (pancan-
gas) (Sewell and Dikshit 1896:40—41). In India, successive, endlessly
successive, smaller and larger world ages, some of them separated by
world destructions and world creations, have been worked out into
“a system, which is as typically Indian, as it is unparalleled with other
peoples” (Gonda 1948:41).
Inevitably, Indian conceptions of time attracted the atten-
tion of foreign visitors. Even though, as a Muslim, the 11th century
polymath and traveler to India, al-Birdni, was critical of Hindu and
Buddhist “silly tales” and of statements by some Indian astronomers,
he devoted 12 successive chapters of his Tarikh al-Hind to a detailed
analysis of the Indian conceptions of time (al-Biruni 1964:327—88;
92 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

also on Rashid al-Din, Jahn 1957). Seven centuries later, in the

Preface to the Code of Gentoo Laws, a digest of Hindu law commis-
sioned by Governor-General Warren Hastings and translated into
English by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1776). Halhed expressed his
amazement about the Hindu world ages: “Computation is lost, and
conjecture overwhelmed in the attempt to adjust such astonishing
spaces of time to our own confined notions of the world’s epoch: to
such antiquity the Mosaic Creation is but as yesterday; and to such
ages the life of Methuselah is no more than a span!” (R. Rocher 1983;
Marshall 19'70:158—159). The first president of the Asiatic Society in
Calcutta (founded in 1784), Sir William Jones, contributed an article
“On the Chronology of the Hindus” to the Society's journal, the
Asiatick Researches (1788), in which he “venture[d] to start a question,
‘whether it is not in fact the same as our own, but embellished and
obscured by the fancy of their poets and the riddles of their
astronomers” (Marshall 1970:262). To be sure, James Mill was not
impressed by the Orientalists in Calcutta who considered Hindu con-
ceptions of time “entitled to a very serious and profound investiga-
tion.” For him, Indian conceptions of time, “[t]he offspring of a wild
and ungoverned imagination, . . . mark the state of a rude and credu-
lous people, whom the marvelous delights; who cannot estimate the
use of a record of past events; and whose imagination the real occur-
rences of life are too familiar to engage” (Mill 1840:163, 166).

Indian Systems of Cyclical Time

The Jaina, Buddhist, and, especially, Hindu systems of world ages and
cyclical time have been described repeatedly. In this comparative vol-
ume on the concepts of time in different ancient civilizations I will
again briefly describe the Indian systems, but then concentrate on
the disputed question: is the Indian system of cyclical time indige-
nous to the subcontinent, or did the Indians borrow it from another
ancient civilization?
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 93

The basic idea in Hindu cyclical time is that four world

ages, called yugas, succeed each other with no interruption (Jacobi
1908; Abegg 1918; Eliade 1957; Kane 1958:686—718; Brown
1966:68—87; Reimann 1988). Throughout these four periods every-
thing goes diminuendo—time itself, people’s life spans, their intelli-
gence, and their morals and standards of behavior (dharma). At the
end of the fourth and worst period Vishnu descends on earth in the
form his tenth avatdra, Kalki(n), and reinstates the new “golden age.”
Differently from, for instance, Hesiod’s world ages which
derive their names from gradually less-precious metals, the names of
the Indian yugas correspond to those of diminishing throws of dice, a
game that was popular in ancient India (Ltiders 1907). Krita is the
throw that is “made, well made, perfect”; Vittore Pisani (1943) con-
nected the term krita with the numeral 4. The first period is also
called satya-yuga, the “truth-age,” the age in which everything is as it
ought to be. Treta is clearly related to the number 3 and dvdpara to
the number 2; the etymology of kali is uncertain: the connection of
kali with Sanskrit kala (“time”) or kala (“black”), or with the goddess
Kali is based on Indian popular etymology (Abegg 1928:20—21).
Differently also from other civilizations which share the
concept of successive world ages, Indians have quantified the four
yugas, in the diminishing ratio of 4 : 3 : 2 : 1. The duration of the yugas
is based on the sequence 4,000 : 3,000 : 2,000 : 1,000, to each of
which the texts usually add dawns (sandhya) and twilights (sandhyan-
sha) equal to one-tenth of the yuga, which leads to yugas of 4,800,
3,600, 2,400, and 1,200 years. The ratio 4 : 3 : 2 : 1 is maintained
throughout: the human lifespan diminishes from 400 years in the kri-
tayuga to 100 years in the kaliyuga; dharma (often depicted as a cow)
stands on four legs in the kritayuga , looses one leg in each of the next
two, and stands on only one leg in the dismal kaliyuga.
Most texts then introduce a different concept. The duration
of the yugas must be understood not in terms of human years, but in
terms of divine years, a human year corresponding to one divine day
an old concept going back to the Taittirtya Brahmana (3.9.22.1).
94 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Hence all figures mentioned so far are multiplied by 360: the kritayu-
ga lasts 1,728,000 years, the tretayuga 1,296,000 years, the dva-
parayuga 864,000 years, the kaliyuga 432,000 years, and the total of
the four yugas—the caturyuga or mahayuga—lasts 4,320,000 years.
Immediately after the last kaliyuga of the caturyuga, the first
dawn of a new caturyuga sets in, and this process is repeated one
thousand times, without interruption. This period of one thousand
caturyugas, i.e., 4,320,000,000 human years, is given the name of
either kalpa or “day of Brahma.”” A “day of Brahma” is naturally fol-
lowed by a “night of Brahma,” of the same duration, so that one
nychthemeron of Brahma comprises 8,640,000,000 years.
Differently from the shorter time periods (yugas and caturyugas),
which follow each other without interruption, the day of Brahma is
followed by a world destruction (pralaya), and the night of Bralima is
followed by a world creation.
Brahma does not live just nychthemeron. He lives a full life,
and, in ancient India, according to the Rigveda (1.89.9, 1.64.14.,
2.33.2), the ideal life span was considered to be one hundred years.
The life of Brahma (also called mahakalpa), therefore, corresponds to
8,640,000,000 - 360 - 100 = 311,040,000,000,000 human years.
Finally—and here exactitude gives way to speculation—
some texts go on to say that the present Brahma has been preceded
by and will be followed by numerous other Brahmas (Fleet
1911:483, n.1). Or, they say that one life of Brahma is equal to one
day, or to just one eyewink of Vishnu (Burgess and Whitney 1860:
155). Irrespective of the way in which it is justified, the point is that
cyclical time in Hinduism is eternal, without beginning or end (Jones
1788, in Marshall 1970:265).
To complete the picture of cyclical time in Hinduism, we
must note that, along with the yugas, a second system of cycles
evolves. Within each kalpa, i.e., within a period of 1,000 caturyugas,

* Even though Sanskrit words are usually cited in the stem form, I use the
masculine nominative form brahma, to distinguish the god Brahma (stem brahman) from
the neuter abstract principle brahman (nominative brahma).
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 95

there are 14 manvantaras “intervals of Manu.” Each manvantara has it

own Manu patriarch, its own gods, and its own sages (rishi). Since a
kalpa of 1,000 caturyugas is not divisible by 14, some texts, including
the Manusmriti and Brahmagupta (Fleet 1911:486), say that a manvan-
tara corresponds to 71 caturyugas, a total of 994 caturyugas, which
leaves 6 caturyugas unaccounted for (Markandeya purana 46.34). Some
texts leave it at that (Kane 1946:891). According to other texts, each
manvantara comprises 72 caturyugas, 1,008 caturyugas in all, i.e., an
excess of 8 caturyugas (Shukla 1976:197). Other texts again work
with 71 caturyugas, and divide the 6 remaining caturyugas into 15
juncture periods (sandhi) of 0.4 caturyugas each, which they insert
before the first and after all 14 manvantaras, (14 manvantaras - 71) +
(0.4 manvantaras - 15) = 1,000 caturyugas, a system adopted by the
Saryasiddhanta (1.18—19) (Burgess and Whitney 1860:154; Fleet
1911:486).
These details demonstrate how the manvantara system, the
origin of which is unknown, was gradually and rather uncomfortably
forced to fit within the yuga/kalpa system: Pusalker (1955) consid-
ers the insertion of 71 manvantaras into a kalpa “purely hypothetical
and a later élaboration” (Ivi).
Hindu texts also speculate on the beginning of the present
kaliyuga, all speculations being connected with events in the
Mahabharata. The Indian astronomers fixed the beginning of the
kaliyuga at midnight between 17 and 18 February 3101 B.C.E.
(Pingree 1963:239). The Hindus now live in the 457th (of 1,000)
caturyuga and the seventh (of 14) manvantara of the 18,001st (of
36,000) kalpa/day of Brahma. The present day of Brahma is called
Varahakalpa; the present Manu is Manu Vaivasvata.
Differently from Hinduism, Jainism does accept both
descending and ascending time periods (Glasenapp 1964:262—310;
Jaini 1979:30-32; Reimann 1988:114~-16). These periods follow
one another without any interruption. For the Jainas the world exists
permanently and eternally, without any intervening world destruc-
tion. Time is viewed as a turning wheel (cakra) whose 12 spokes con-
96 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

stantly revolve downward and upward. The 6 parts of the avasarpini

(“descending”) half of the cycle are: (1) the susham4a-sushama (“good-
good”), (2) sushama (“good”), (3) sushamd-dushshama (“good-bad”),
(4) dushshama-sushamaé (“bad-good”), (5) dushshama (“bad”), and
dushshamda-dushshamé (“bad-bad”) periods. After the end of the
avasarpini , the 6 periods follow one another again, in reverse order,
in the utsarpini (“upward”) half of the cycle.
Like Hinduism, Jainism assigns numbers, though less specif-
ic numbers, of years to the duration of each time period. They are
expressed neither in human or divine years, but are far vaster and
less clearly defined: kotikotis of sagaropamas. A koti (modern “crore”)
corresponds to 10,000,000. One sagaropama itself equals ten kotiko-
tis of palyopamas, one palyopama being the time needed to empty a
container one yojana [i.e., 4 miles or more!] in diameter and one
yojana high, filled with tender hairs, if one removes one hair every
100 years (Glasenapp 1964:155). Even as in Hinduism, in Jainism
the duration of the 4 best periods is in the ratio of 4: 3: 2:1: four
kotikotis of sagaropamas, three, etc. Except that, from the fourth best
period, the Jainas subtract 42,000 years that are equally divided into
21,000 years assigned to the fifth and sixth periods. We now live in
the fifth period of the avasarpini , which started three years after the
death of Mahavira (Stevenson 1915:275),
It is obvious that the Jainas, following the typically Indian
tendency of enlarging existing numeral systems, made an effort to
adopt the Hindu system of cyclical time within their ever-revolving
wheel of time, a concept that goes back to the Vedas (Rigveda
1.164.14) (Brown 1968:213).
Buddhist cyclical time operates with numbers which are as
speculative as those of Jainism (La Vallee-Poussin 1908; Bareau 1975;
Kloetzli 1983). Even as Hinduism, Buddhism operates with kalpas,
usually called mahakalpas, which follow one another endlessly. Even
as the yugas in Hinduism, the Buddhist kalpas are 4 in number, in this
order: (1) a kalpa of renovation (vivarta), (2) a kalpa during which the
world remains renovated (vivartavasthayin), (3) a kalpa of destruction
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 97

(sanvarta), and (4) a kalpa in which the world remains destroyed (san-
vartavasthayin). Differently from Hinduism and from Jainism, the
duration of the mahdkalpas is asankheyya (Pali; Sanskrit asankhyeya)
(“incalculable”) literally “not to be expressed in numbers.” One
favorite description of asankheyya is as follows: “It is as if there were
a mountain consisting of a great rock, a league in length, a league in
width, a league in height, without break, cleft, or hollow, and every
hundred years a man were to come and rub it once with a silken gar-
ment; that mountain consisting of a great rock would more quickly
wear away and come to an end than a world-cycle” (Warren
1896:315,n. 1).
The fact that the incalculable mahakalpas are subdivided into
20 antarakalpas (“intermediate kalpas”) is unimportant for our pres-
ent purpose. What is important is that, within the twentieth and last
antarakalpa of the mahakalpa in which the world remains renovated,
the Buddhists insert 4 brief periods of increase and 4 equally brief
periods of decrease. And these periods are, once again, designated
with the names of the Hindu yugas: kali, dvapara, treta, and krita in an
ascending period, and krita, treta, dvapara, and kali in a descending
sequence.
In other words, even as the Jainas, the Buddhists worked
out a system of cyclical time of their own. Yet, they, too, felt obliged
to reserve a niche to incorporate the Hindu yuga system in it.

The Origin of the Hindu Yuga/Kalpa System

The foregoing description of the three systems of cyclical time con-

firms Thomas Trautmann’s evaluation that “[n]ames and numbers dif-
fer among the different religions, but it is plain that we are dealing
with variants of a single patron, a unitary Indian intellectual culture
of time.” As far as Jainism and Buddhism are concerned, he under-
scores the “gross structural similarities with the Hindu system,” and
views their systems of time as “deliberate distortions and redefini-
98 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

tions of Hindu schemes that read like parodies” (Trautmann

1995:171). Louis de La Vallée-Poussin notes that the fanciful ideas
of cyclical time “do not appear to be essential to Buddhism, whether
looked upon as a religion or as a philosophy. Nor are they of mytho-
logical moment, being rather matter of ‘secular knowledge, or, as
the Buddhists would say, Lokayika” (1908:188). The Jainas, too, are
less concerned with the global scheme of the endlessly rotating
wheel of time; their only concern is “the current avasarpini and that
smal] area where human life is enacted” (Dundas 1991:18). When we
look for the origin. of the concept of cyclical time in India, it is,
therefore, the origin of cyclical in Hinduism that is of primary
importance.
The Hindu system of yugas and kalpas, as described, is
absent from the oldest, Vedic literature, but it is omnipresent in later
texts: the Manusmriti, the Mahabharata (Buhler 1886:lxxxiii—xc), the
Puranas, the treatises of most schools of Hindu philosophy, inscrip-
tions, and the works of the Indian astronomers. Hence the alterna-
tive: either the system developed within India under the impulse of
the composers of one or more of the later sources, or one of the later
sources borrowed the system from outside India. It is my purpose to
propose a third, different origin of the yuga/kalpa system of cyclical
time.
The theory that cyclical time developed inside India in the
post-Vedic period is most prominent in the writings of scholars of
Indian philosophy (Schayer 1938; Mandal 1968). Paul Deussen
(1920), a scholar and admirer of Shankara’s advaita Vedanta philoso-
phy, tried to prove that the theory of endless world creations and
world destructions was elaborated within Vedanta, as early as
Gaudapada and Shankara, perhaps even in Badarayana’s Vedantasiitras.
Vedanta needed to create that concept to reconcile the beginningless
course of sansdra, forever determined by actions in previous exis-
tences, with the Upanishadic term agre (“in the beginning”). To har-
monize the two contradictory views, Vedanta interpreted agre in the
Upanishads as referring to the beginning of successive new world
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 99

creations. According to Richard Garbe (1895), who wrote the first

comprehensive study of Sankhya philosophy, India’s fascination with
high numbers, which manifests itself in the teachings of all disci-
plines, must be traced back to the Sankhya system—the term
“Sankhya” derives from sankhya (“number”)— and the doctrine of
world ages originated within Sankhya philosophy. Garbe maintained
that the concept of world ages was first taken over from Sankhya by
Buddhism and Jainism, and only later, after the “brahmanization” of
Sankhya, by brahmanical literature (56, 222). In a review of Die
Sankhya Philosophie, Jacobi (1895) refuted Garbe’s theses: the num-
bers in Sankhya are “ausserst bescheiden” as compared to those of
Jainism and Buddhism, and Garbe failed to prove that evolution and
reabsorption of the world are necessary consequences of Sankhya
philosophy” (209-10).
The theory that Indian cyclical time is not of Indian but of
foreign origin results from the belief that the yuga/kalpa system was
created by Indian astronomers who borrowed it from foreigners,
especially the Babylonians. Nearly a century ago F. Rock (1910)
argued that all the numbers used in Hindu cyclical time, from the
caturyuga down to the individual yugas, both with and without dawns
and twilights, were known in Babylonia around 2400 BCE; the cor-
respondences cannot be accidental, they result from “eine allgemeine
Verbreitung babylonischer Kultur.”
There is no doubt that the Indian astronomers made impor-
tant contributions to the concept of time and world ages, nor is there
any doubt that, in their computations, they borrowed heavily from
their Babylonian—and other—counterparts (Pingree 1978a:3;
1978b). Entire passages in the works of the Indian astronomers
became understandable only after comparing them with Babylonian
sources (Neugebauer 1957:172).Yet, such borrowing does not mean
that concepts of cyclical time and world ages separated by destruc-
tion and recreation may not have existed in India outside the circle
of the astronomers, and at a time that antedates their works (Fleet
1911:484).
100 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

The principal point of comparison is the kalpa of

4,320,000,000 years. As David Pingree pointed out, “[t}his is a
Babylonian number: sexagesimally it would be written 2,0,0,0. It is
the span of time given to the Babylonian kingdom before the Flood
in the histories of Berossos and Abydenus” (1963:238; see also van
der Waerden 1952:150, 1977/78:363). According to Pingree, it is
most likely that the number became known in India at the time of the
Achaemenid occupation of the northwest: the term kalpa does
appear in Ashoka’s inscriptions (Hultzsch 1969:31, 33) and in the
Dighanikaya (Carpenter 1911:51, 111). “This kalpa of ultimately
Babylonian origin was combined by the Indian astronomers of the
late 4th and 5th century with the Greek epicyclic theory” (Pingree
1963:239). With the kalpa as the starting point, the smaller periods
are described as later developments: “Each kalpa is divided into
1,000 equal parts called mahayugas which are 4,320.000 years
apiece, and each mahdyuga contains four smaller yugas which are in
the ratio to each other of 4:3, 3:2, and 2:1. The last yuga, then, the
kaliyuga is 1/10 mahayuga, or 432,000 years” (Pingree 1963:238).
I wish to argue that the concept of cyclical time and world
ages may have grown in India itself, not from the larger kalpa down
to the smaller units, but from the smaller units up to the kalpa
(Burgess and Whitney 1860:155), the length of which happened to
coincide with the Babylonian number 4,320,000,000. In fact, the
centerpiece of the entire system is the age in which we now live, i.e.,
the shortest period, the kaliyuga. No period has been described in as
great detail in the texts as the kaliyuga, not so much because it was
better known than any other (Sharma 1982; Yadava 1979), but
because it was “the most important part in the whole scheme, since
. . . the beginning of it is the pivot of the whole system” (Fleet
1911:480).
First, we may not forget that man, living in the jungles of
ancient India, “[felt] himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos
and the cosmic rhythms” (Eliade 1959:vii). He noticed cycles in his
own life and expanded them into cosmic cycles. Hence, the passage
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 101

from the Manusmriti (1.64—74), which is often quoted for its

description of cyclical time, proceeds uninterruptedly from the
smallest unit of time, the nimesha ("eyeblink”), to the kalpa. It defines
the length of each larger unit strictly in terms of the length of the
immediately shorter one: 18 nimeshas equal 1 kastha; 30 kasthas equal
1 kala; 30 kalas equal 1 muhirta ; 30 muhirtas equal 1 nychthemeron;
1 month equals 1 day of the manes; 1 year equals one day of the gods;
4,800 divine years equal 1 kritayuga ; the other three yugas are each
1,100 years shorter than the preceding one; 12,000 divine years
equal one age of the gods; 1,000 ages of the gods equal 1 one day of
Brahma, which is followed by a night of Brahma of equal length, and
a new creation (for a similar progression in other texts see Kirfel
1967:333—39; Glasenapp 1964:154—55).
Second, we know, and historians of mathematics have not
failed to notice, that, from early onward, Indians were able to con-
ceive unusually high numbers (Menninger 1957:147; Thibaut
1899:70; Clark 1937:343—344), Even in Vedic times, in counting the
bricks that are required to erect the altar for a sacrifice (Weber
1861:134), the Vajasaneyisanhita and other texts contain names for
powers of ten up to the 16th (Macdonell and Keith 1958:342—343,
Wackernagel 1930:375—78); Buddhism and Jainism went even far-
ther than Hinduism. Even as Macdonell and Keith, Bibhutibhusan
Datta and Avadhesh N. Singh stress that “from the very earliest
known times, ten has formed the basis of enumeration in India”
(1962:9; see also Fleet 1911:486, n. 1).
Third, as far as the number 432,000 is concerned, it, too,
appears in Vedic literature. To be sure, in the Vedic texts the number
432,000 refers not to world ages but to the number of syllables in the
Rigveda. The Rigveda is said to consist of 12,000 verses called brihati ,
at 36 syllables each, or 432,000 syllables. Similarly, the Yajurveda is said
to consist of 8,000 brihatis - 36 = 288,000 syllables, and the Samaveda
is said to comprise 4,000 brihatis - 36 = 144,000 syllables. That means
that the number of syllables in the Yajurveda and the Samaveda, taken
together, again amounts to 432,000. In the words of Luis Gonzalez
102 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Reimann (1988), “[s]i el 432,000 es un numero babildnico, es también

un numero vedico” (103). Besides, when anyone anywhere operates
simultaneously with the numbers 12 and 36, be it 12,000 verses of 36
syllables, or years of 12 months and 360 days, one is bound to
encounter the number 432 followed by a number of zeros.
At this point we must raise the question: if the concept of
cyclical time and world ages was indigenous to India, prior to the
works of the philosophers and the astronomers, when and where did
it originate?
As mentioned earlier, the yuga/kalpa system, as described
here, is absent in the Vedic texts. Yet, being absent from the Vedic texts
is not necessarily equivalent with being absent in Vedic times. In other
words, although the yuga/kalpa system is not described in the Vedic
texts we should not therefore conclude that the system is post- Vedic.
Vedic scholars often overlook the fact that they are dealing with a
period in Indian history for which the written records are limited, to
one single text for the earliest stage (the Rigveda), and gradually more
texts, yet all issued from the same restricted socio-religious milieus.
Considering these texts as representative of life in Vedic times
(Bhargava 1971; Zimmer 1879) is fallacious. The Vedas never were
texts of the Indian masses. The texts themselves insist that they should
not even be listened to by women and shiidras, and many others,
including brahmans, remained totally ignorant of them. It is in that
large extra- Vedic space, whose beliefs were not recorded, that we are
looking for the origin of cyclical time in ancient India.
First, the reason why the concept of eternal return is absent
from the Vedic texts is obvious: it was opposed to some of the basic
principles of Vedic Hinduism. I already referred to the term agre (“in
the beginning”), which appears with some frequency in the
Upanishads. Time does have a beginning in Vedic texts. Deussen
(1920) demonstrated how Shankara needed to interpret a verse
from the Rigveda (10.190.3): “the creator fashioned the sun and the
moon yathapurvam,” not with its obvious meaning “one after the
other,” but with the meaning “as before” (199).
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 103

Conversely, as far as “the end” is concerned, Vedic Hinduism

is a system of escape, of liberation (mukti or moksha ) from the phys-
ical world (cf. Gonda 1948; Trautmann 1995). The doctrine of
karma, in which one’s status in future lives is determined by the
actions performed in prior existences, may lead to temporary laps-
es, but its ultimate goal is to set every atman free, to have it absorbed
into brahma, liberate it from the cycle of death and rebirth (sansara),
and bring its earthly existence to an end. Time is not endless in the
Vedas.
Second, even though the Vedic texts do not describe any
system of cyclical time, they exhibit a large number of passages
which clearly allude to it (Muir 1967:43-49). For each of these pas-
sages scholars have engaged in endless controversies on whether the
Vedic composers knew cyclical time or not. Their conclusions range
from total acceptance to total denial. This chapter can only present a
couple of examples, in chronological order (as far as this is possible
with Indian texts). Even in the Rigveda the term yuga (yugam) indi-
cates not only a yoke (Latin iugum, Greek zugén), but also periods of
‘time, three years, five years, etc., including four instances where
yuga is qualified by the adjective manusha (“human”).
The terms krita,
treta, dvapara, and dskanda (not kali) appear in the Yajurveda but seem
to refer to the game of dice. From the Atharvaveda onward the pic-
ture becomes more confused. A sequence “one hundred years, an
ayuta,” two yugas, three, four” (8.2.21) has led to endless and incon-
clusive disputations, and even more so a passage from the
Aitareyabrahmana: “Kali he becometh who lieth, Dvapara when he
riseth, Treta when he standeth erect, And Krta when he movet ”
(7.15) (Keith 1920:302). Passages in the Upanishads do contain the
terms krita (Chandogya Upanishad 4.1.4, 4.1.6, and 4.3.8) and treta
(Mandiikya Upanishad 1.2.1) but are too obscure to decide in either
direction. Only in the late Shvetashvatara Upanishad is there a refer-
ence to world creation and world destruction (3.2 and 4.1), perhaps

* Ayuta is a word-number for 10,000, i.e., 100 - 100; consequently yuga

might then amount to 10,000 - 100, or even 10,000 - 10,000 years.
104 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

to repeated creation and destruction (5.3), but even here interpreta-

tions vary.
The logical approach to these Vedic texts is not to attempt
to determine whether or not their composers knew or accepted the
system of world periods and eternal return, rather to conclude that
they alluded to them, but did not accept them because they were
ireconcilable with more basic Vedic concepts. Note that the school
of Indian philosophy most concerned with a correct interpretation of
the Veda, Mimansa, is the only one that explicitly rejects the concept
of cyclical time: the Mimansa_ concept of an eternally existing Veda
is incompatible with periodic world destruction.
On the other hand, the most numerous and most detailed
descriptions of cyclical time appear in the Puranas. According to
Willibald Kirfel (1927), the very structure of the Puranas cannot be
properly understood unless it is seen against the background of
world creations and world destructions (xvii). In his commentary on
the Rigveda, Sdyana clearly states that, women and shiidras_ being
barred from access to the true Veda, “the purdnas are the Vedas for
women and shiidras ” (L. Rocher 1986:16). The puranas are “the scrip-
tures of popular Hinduism” (Raghavan 1953; Rocher 1986:16).
Understandably, this popular literature, originating outside the lim-
ited circle of the Vedic practitioners, as we have it on our book
shelves, is far more recent than the Vedas. The idea that the materials
contained in the puranas are not merely recent, and representative of
later sectarian Hinduism only was first put forth by Vans Kennedy
(1831) (against Wilson 1972:iii-iv; see also Burnouf 1840:viii-ix;
Chaudhuri 1929). By now, there is general agreement that many
materials incorporated in the relatively recent purdnas are, in fact,
old, even as old as the Vedas. Given the oblique references to cyclical
time in the Vedas on the one hand, and the detailed descriptions in
the purdnas on the other, we suggest that the concept of cyclical time
in India originated in extra-Vedic “popular” beliefs in early, possibly
Vedic, times. Similarly, Oskar von Hintber (1994) convincingly
argued in favor of an oral formula tradition, which appears in
 CONCEPTS OF TIME IN CLASSICAL INDIA 105

Buddhist sources, but must be much older, even though Vedic litera-
ture does not mention it (7).
The fact that world ages and cyclical time in India are old,
that they did not have to wait for the writers of the philosophical
schools to invent them or for the astronomers to borrow them from
sources outside India, is not surprising. As Eliade states, “it would be
difficult to explain why the Indo-Aryans did not also share, from the
period of their common prehistory, the conception of time held by
all primitives” (1949:115; also 1957:177). Given Indians’ propensi-
ty to quantify, it is also not surprising that they amplified the cycles
they perceived around them—day /night, seasons, years—into ever-
larger cycles and that they assigned proportionately higher numbers
to them. What makes Indians unique is the extent to which, at an
early date, they elaborated a system of cyclical time in great detail
(Eliot 1962:334; Schneider 1958:156), and the way—or ways—in
which they made similar but ever larger cycles proceed from human
time to divine time, and from divine time-——even Brahma’s life is
measured—to endless cosmic time.

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 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL
TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

Marc Brettler

n the middle of the 20th century there was a common perception

[= biblical time is fundamentally different in nature from time
as it was understood in classical antiquity. The contrast was often
drawn between biblical teleological time—time that is oriented
toward the end or completion, and Greek cyclical time (Curtis
1963; Brettler 1995). Most scholars have moved away from this sim-
ple typology to appreciate that in both civilizations there were a vari-
ety of conceptions of time. We shall attempt to outline ancient
Israelite notions of time as reflected in the Hebrew Bible. One of the
major changes of biblical scholarship since the 1980s, partially under
the influence of feminism, is an appreciation of the difference
between biblical Israel (Israel as it is reflected in the Bible) and
ancient Israel. The latter reflects a much broader group of people
than what is reflected in the Bible (Zevit 2001). Most significantly,
there is a recognition that the Bible by and large reflects elite rather
than popular perspectives and that it is thus not prudent to general-
ize from the Bible to ancient Israel as a whole. We shall also suggest,
somewhat paradoxically, that the notions of cyclical and teleological
time are not as contradictory as they might seem.
112 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

It is not easy to summarize the biblical notion(s) of time.

The Hebrew Bible is a complex anthology produced over a millenni-
um, with the earliest part usually considered to be the Song of
Deborah, from the 12th pre-Christian century while parts of the
book of Daniel reflect the 2nd pre-Christian century. It is unlikely
that all biblical authors during this long time period had the same
notions of time. Furthermore, given that most biblical literature pre-
dates the Greek introduction of second-order thinking, which may
only be found in Ecclesiastes (Machinist 1995), there are few theo-
retical comments about time in the Bible (Barr 1961). We shall begin
with the most explicit discussion of time, from the book of
Ecclesiastes, most probably a late 3rd century biblical book
(Crenshaw 1992; Machinist 1995; Seow 1997), which does contain
explicit reflections about cyclical time. These reflections will frame
an exposition of other biblical texts.
Ecclesiastes is one of the few biblical books to contain the
word ]{1 (“time” in modern Hebrew), a word borrowed from the
Aramaic 8231 (Koehler and Baumgartner 1994). The more common
biblical word for “time,” typically used for a specific time, is NY. An
analysis of the distribution of this word in Ecclesiastes relative to the
rest of the Bible shows that it is literally off the charts—NY, cited 40
times, comprises nearly .9% of the words in that book. Of course
many of these occurrences are in the famous chapter 3:

(1) A time (731) is set for everything, a time (MY) for every
experience under heaven: (2) A time (NY) for being born
and a time (1) for dying, a time (NY) for planting and a
time (WY) for uprooting the planted; (3) a time for slaying
and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time
for building up; (4) a time for weeping and a time for laugh-
ing, a time for wailing and a time for dancing; (5) a time for
throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, a time for
embracing and a time for shunning embraces; (6) a time for
seeking and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 113

for discarding; (7) a time for ripping and a time for sewing,
a time for silence and a time for speaking; (8) a time for
loving and a time for hating; a time for war and a time for
peace. (Tanakh 1985, slightly modified)

The word MY appears throughout the book as well (see

3:11, 17; 7:17; 8:5, 6, 9; 9:8, 11, 12 (2x); 10:17). Its use in chapter
3 is exactly the opposite of that seized upon by the anti-war move-
ment. It does not mean that through human effort we can determine
that it is a time for peace rather than a time for war; instead, it sug-
gests that God determines these times. In the words of Ecclesiastes
3:9-11, words that never made it into Pete Seeger’s famous song,
“(9) What value, then, can the man of affairs get from what he earns?
(10) I have observed the business that God gave man to be concerned
with: (11) He brings everything to pass precisely at its time; He also
puts eternity in their mind, but without man ever guessing, from
first to last, all the things that God brings to pass.”
In other words, God controls the cycles of events, com-
prised of each event and its opposite. People are created with a desire
to understand these cycles, but as the previous verses emphasize, that
desire is futile.
With the exception of some of its final verses, which likely
reflect a pious reworking of the main ideas of Ecclesiastes, the book
is typically considered to be an editorial unity though, since it incor-
porates earlier material, it should not be considered the composition
of a single individual (Crenshaw 1992:272—73). The opening of the
book, which should be connected to chapter 3, is one of the
strongest statements of periodicity (1:4—9):

(4) One generation goes, another comes, but the earth

remains the same forever. (5) The sun rises, and the sun
sets—and glides back to where it rises. (6) Southward
blowing, turning northward, ever turning blows the wind;
on its rounds the wind returns. (7) All streams flow into the
114 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place from which they
flow the streams flow back again. (8) All such things are
wearisome: No man can ever state them; the eye never has
enough of seeing, nor the ear enough of hearing. (9) Only
that shall happen which has happened, only that occur which
has occurred; there is nothing new beneath the sun!

Humanity is powerless before this divinely controlled peri-

odicity; this explains why the philosopher believes (1:2—3): “(2)
Utter futility!—said Koheleth—Utter futility! All is futile! (3) What
real value is there for a man in all the gains he makes beneath the
sun?” Chapter 3:10—11, which states that God gave people the desire
to figure out the future, with no success, adds to this feeling of futil-
ity: events repeat, and the general principles of these repetitions are
noted by people, but they are incompletely understood, and humans
cannot determine their specifics.
The idea of periodicity of events is reflected in a variety of
other, earlier texts as well. For example, Jeremiah 5:24 notes that
God could be understood as the One “who gives the rain, the early
and late rain in season” (Fox 1999:199). This notion is based on the
climate of Israel, which is extremely predictable, with a rainy season
stretching from October through March (Frick 1992:122—25). It is
extremely rare for it to rain from May to September. Such cycles,
which determined all agricultural activities, were quite obvious to
the ancient Israelite. In fact, the earliest extra-biblical Hebrew docu-
ment, the Gezer calendar, a pottery shard most likely from the 10th
century, lists 8 periods of one or two months each and characterizes
each through an agricultural activity: “months of vintage and olive
harvest; months of sowing; months of spring pasture; month of flax
pulling; month of barley harvest; month of wheat harvest and meas-
uring; months of pruning; month of summer fruit” (Gibson 1973:2;
see also McCarter 2000:222). Though not all phenomena should be
reduced to environmental issues (Thompson 1999:155—58), it
seems obvious that a civilization that develops in an area with stark,
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 115

clearly observable weather patterns that determine sustenance might

view the world more generally through cycles.
This understanding may have influenced the authors of
some biblical texts, who depicted specific events in a cyclical or peri-
odic fashion, as they gave a narrative shape to the (perceived) past
(Brettler 1995). These historians, who lived in the 6th century before
the time of Ecclesiastes, were not thinking in abstract terms of time
as cyclical as they composed the Deuteronomistic History—
Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Nevertheless, the
manner in which historical events are depicted in this large work is
important and may have a bearing on a society's understanding of
time (see Muntz 1977:223 cautioning about a society's ideas about
determining the past from their historical narratives).
These cycles are most explicit in the biblical book of
Judges, which depicts the history after the “conquest” of Canaan,
described in the book of Joshua (Dever 1990:37—84), and before the
rise of the monarchy, described in Samuel. The history of the com-
position of Judges is quite complex and is made even more compli-
cated by the fact that it is both a self-standing book and, according to
scholarly theories, is part of Deuteronomistic History (McKenzie
1992:160—-168; Campbell and O’Brien 2000). These five books—
Samuel and Kings are a single book in the Hebrew tradition but are
split into two in the Septuagint tradition, which is followed by the
Vulgate and the English tradition—were brought together by an
ancient editor who was part of the Deuteronomistic school. In other
words, these books share the ideology, theology, and vocabulary of
the book of Deuteronomy, which ultimately formed the introduction
to the Deuteronomistic history. This is not a technical, trivial hypoth-
esis, but a strong theory which suggests that a discussion of periodic-
ity in Judges should also look at the place of this phenomenon in the
larger work.
The major section of Judges (Brettler 2002), comprised of
the middle of chapter two through the end of chapter 16, is charac-
terized by cycles. What is so very unusual about this is that these
116 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

cycles are (1) extensive; (2) mentioned explicitly throughout the

book; and (3) introduced through the verb 15°01") “they again” (see
3:12; 4:1; 10:6; 13:1), They are first presented in a paradigm in
2:11-19 (see Becker 1990:83, Lindars 1995:100, and Greenspahn
1986 for slightly differing outlines of the paradigm):

(11) And the Israelites did what was offensive to the Lord.
They worshiped the Baalim (12) and forsook the Lord, the
God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land
of Egypt. They followed other gods, from among the gods of
the peoples around them, and bowed down to them; they
provoked the Lord. (13) They forsook the Lord and wor-
shiped Baal and the Ashtaroth. (14) Then the Lord was
incensed at Israel, and He handed them over to foes who
plundered them. He surrendered them to their enemies on
all sides, and they could no longer hold their own against
their enemies. (15) In all their campaigns, the hand of the
Lord was against them to their undoing, as the Lord had
declared and as the Lord had sworn to them; and they were
in great distress. (16) Then the Lord raised up chieftains
[others “judges”] who delivered them from those who plun-
dered them. (17) But they did not heed their chieftains
either; they went astray after other gods and bowed down to
them. They were quick to turn aside from the way their
fathers had followed in obedience to the commandments of
the Lord; they did not do right. (18) When the Lord raised
up chieftains for them, the Lord would be with the chieftain
and would save them from their enemies during the chief-
tain’s lifetime; for the Lord would be moved to pity by their
moanings because of those who oppressed and crushed
them. (19) But when the chieftain died, they would again act
basely, even more than the preceding generation—following
other gods, worshiping them, and bowing down to them;
they omitted none of their practices and stubborn ways.
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 117

This cycle ends where it begins. Chapters 3-16 then illus-

trate it with a depiction of six judges——called major judges (Brettler
2002:22—-23)—-or chieftains: Othniel, Ehud, Deborah-Barak,
Gideon, Jephtah, and Samson. These are called major judges by
scholars. Though each major judge narrative is very different in size
and style, each contains some of the language also found in the para-
digm in chapter 2, and each illustrates the pattern of that paradigm.
For example, the story of Gideon begins: “Then the Israelites did
what was offensive to the LORD, and the LORD delivered them into
the hands of the Midianites for seven years” (6:1). It then describes
this subjugation in some detail, noting: “Israel was reduced to utter
misery by the Midianites, and the Israelites cried out to the LORD”
(v. 6). Gideon is then commissioned as a judge, and he defeats the
enemy. The story concludes: “Thus Midian submitted to the Israelites
and did not raise its head again; and the land was tranquil for forty
years in Gideon’s time” (8:28). The other five stories about the major
judges have the same structure and use much of the same vocabulary.
Periodicity is evident elsewhere in the book as well. In addi-
tion to the judges mentioned above, about whom we have detailed
narratives, chapters 10 and 12 list leaders—called minor judges
(Brettler 2002:22—23)—-with little information. It is uncertain
whether these judges had a different function than the major judges
or if they had a similar function and may have been known to the edi-
tor through a different source (see the studies of Mullen and Lemche
at Brettler 2002:22). What is significant is how highly structured this
list is: many of these entries share the structure “After X son of Y son
of Z/him, a man A, arose to deliver/judge Israel. He lived at B in C.
He judged Israel for D years; then he died and was buried at E.” The
variables, X,Y, Z, A—E are often different, but the structure of the
list, especially within the structure of Judges, suggests strong perio-
dicity.
The last five chapters of Judges, 17—21, do not depict
judges of either the major or minor type; instead, they are often
seen (perhaps incorrectly) as an appendix (Brettler 2002: 80). They
118 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

too exhibit periodicity, especially through the refrain which

appears in each of the two horrific stories narrated. This refrain
appears once in each in the short form “In those days there was no
king in Israel” (Judges 18:1; 19:1) and once each in the long form
which supplements the earlier statement with “each man did as he
pleased” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). Finally, given all of these repetitions
and cycles, it is tempting to read the introduction to the book,
especially the successive notes in chapter one that tribe after tribe
did not succeed in dispossessing the natives of the land (Judges
1:19, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33) as cyclical as well (Brettler
2002:92—102).
Cycles predominate in the book of Judges, appearing in all
sections of the book. The book’s author clearly believed that history
repeats itself and in that sense believed in cyclical time. Events are
like the seasons and times of Ecclesiastes, like the weather of ancient
Israel noted in Jeremiah, which has a clear structure, though it is
open to some internal variation. Similarly, the judges are all depict-
ed in a similar fashion, though they do not all behave in exactly the
same manner or defeat the same enemy.
The structure of Judges as a set of cycles is unique and is not
repeated elsewhere in the Deuteronomistic history. This is especially
striking in Joshua, where it would have been easy to depict the con-
quest of Canaan as a set of recurring, similar conquests of smaller
parts of the land, but this is not done. Some obvious patterns appear
in Samuel and Kings—for example, a cycle of David fleeing from
Saul at the end of Second Samuel (Brettler 2002:13—15), or a very
vague pattern of good and bad kings in Kings (Trompf 1979:227),
but there is no pattern as tight as the one found explicitly in Judges.
There are several cases of what Trompf (19779) calls recurrence, what
others might call typology (Brettler 1995), but there are no cycles
comparable to those found in Judges. Certain patterns which schol-
ars find, for example, “the recurrent pattern of failure and grace”
(Trompf 1979a:222) are either overly schematic or Christian, or
both.
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 119

It is possible that Deuteronomy is attempting to suggest that

there would be a pattern of Moses-like prophets succeeding one
another: “I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own peo-
ple, like yourself: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak
to them all that I command him” (18:18). Wilson (1980:155—156)
speaks of a succession of prophets holding the office of a Mosaic
prophet. Thus, within the Deuteronomistic history, Joshua succeeds
Moses (Deuteronomy 34:9) (Romer and Brettler 2000), and Elisha
succeeds Elijah (1 Kings 19:19; 2 Kings 2:13—15) (McKenzie 1991),
but this is hardly worked out in the detail of the cyclical pattern like
the one found in Judges. Incidentally, it should not be surprising that
this idea of cycles is unique to Judges, since that book is unique in
other ways as well, including its focus on women (Bellis
1994:112-139; Ackerman 1998), and its depiction of that period as a
unique period of divine grace in which God forgives Israel time and
time again even though his people do not repent (Greenspahn 1986).
Cases of recurrence may be found outside the
Deuteronomistic history (Knopper 2001), but here too none of
these is as structured as Judges. For example, the book of Genesis is
often read as a succession of experiments: first Adam and his descen-
dents are chosen, but this fails, so Noah and his descendents are cho-
sen, but this fails, and then Abram is chosen (Westerman
1984:66—-67). This structure, however, is not clearly marked in the
text. Certain events repeat themselves in Genesis three times. For
example, in chapters 12, 20, and 26, a patriarch attempts to pass his
wife off as his sister (Brettler 1995:51—52). Such repetitions appear
in other books as well. As we have seen, 2 Samuel 24 and 26 both tell
stories of David fleeing from Saul, having the ability to kill him, but
not killing “the Lord’s anointed.” In both stories Saul calls David “my
father.” Essentially, the same event happens twice, in different places,
with slightly different narrative details. It is likely that the existence
of the idea of historical recurrence allowed, perhaps even encour-
aged, the redactors of these texts to incorporate variant traditions so
it would seem that events were recurring.
120 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

The same is true of typologies found throughout the Bible,

but especially in books like Chronicles (Brettler 1995:27). However,
none of these recurrences is marked by a paradigm in the same way
that Judges is, nor do any have several cases of recurrence beginning
with the word 15’071"1, “they again” as in Judges. A more complete
study would uncover different notions of recurrence, from simple
typologies (Trompf 1979a:213), where an event is repeated once,
through the full-blown, six-fold cycle with an introductory paradigm
found in Judges. In any case, it is clear that recurrence does exist in
a range of biblical texts.
As noted earlier, cyclical time is typically contrasted with
linear, teleological time. Since the 19th century, this period has been
called the eschaton, derived from the Greek eschatos, a word that may
mean the “farthest extent in space, final element of time, and last
piece of money” (Petersen 1992:576). This modern convention is
based on early Greek translations in the Septuagint (Marcos 2000),
for the Hebrew 07'3°77 TNX, often translated as the “end of days”
but under Septuagint influence translated in the King James version
as “last days.” The use of the term eschaton and related terms such as
“eschatology” prejudges the situation, suggesting that there is an end
of time. Thus native terms for what may be more neutrally called the
ideal future must be studied to see the extent to which this period is
conceived of as an end and the extent to which earlier time periods
are viewed as inextricably leading up to it.
The terminology used for describing this ideal future never
refers to the end of time. This is even the case for time as it is depict-
ed in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brin 2001:219—367; Collins
1997:52--72; Collins 2000). The scrolls are much more concerned
with eschatology and have a much more developed sense of eschatol-
ogy than all texts from the Hebrew Bible except for Daniel which
shows greater affinity to the Dead Sea Scrolls than to much of the
rest of the Hebrew Bible (Collins 1997:12—18).
A common term found in prophetic literature is the Day of
the Lord (Hebrew 717” 01). Given the wide distribution of this
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 121

term over a long time period, the understanding of this Day is not
stable, but in general it describes a day in which YHWH, the Israelite
God, is manifest in the world as warrior, sometimes fighting against
Israel, sometimes against Israel’s and His enemies (Paul
1991:182—184). The term appears 16 times (Saebo 1990:29). Much
more frequent is the term N17 DY “that day.” It, too, appears in a
variety of contexts, though it is favored in certain prophetic books,
especially Isaiah (Saebo 1990:16). The phrase is often used, especial-
ly in non-prophetic literature, in its plain sense, referring to a day
mentioned earlier in the narrative (but see Saebg 1990:30), but it
also has a technical, prophetic usage referring to a particular time
period. It often seems to refer to the Day of the LORD (Saebo
1990:30).
It is unlikely that these terms refer to the eschatological
period since Hebrew DY in the singular means “a day,” and is not gen-
erally delexicalized in the sense of a broader period of time. The
expected plural of 8177 OV (“that day”) is TTT /O77 OY (“those
days”). This expression is attested in the Hebrew Bible in both a plain
(Judges 21—25) and a technical sense, but the technical sense of an
ideal future period is rare and is largely confined to Jeremiah (3:16,
18; 5:18; 31:29, 33; 33:15; 50:4, 20; Joel 3:2; 4:1; Zechariah 8:6,
10, 23). Here too, none of these contexts suggests that this time is
an end, since “those days” initiate a long time-period. In other con-
texts 07/2’, “days,” without any pronoun, may also refer to the ideal
future. For example, a secondary addition (Wolff 1977:352—354;
Jeremias 1998:162) concluding the book of Amos describing
restored Israel and idealized agricultural productivity is introduced
O’xd OF” 737, “Look—days are coming.” The conclusion of Amos,
for example, suggests a long continuing period. However, there is
nothing in any of these contexts to suggest that these days were
viewed as an end.
The most familiar term that in the popular perception is
related to eschatology is the English “end of days.” This English term,
however, is an incorrect translation from the Hebrew D773" FINN,
122 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

a mistranslation dating from the time of the Septuagint. It is better

translated “in the days to come” (Collins 2000:370—72). This may be
seen most clearly from Genesis 49:1, which introduces the blessings
of the patriarch Jacob, in which he tells his children the fate of their
tribes 0°37 SY INX3. The information conveyed is about the monar-
chical period (Speiser 1964), and certainly not about a final period.
Its use in prophetic contexts bears this out.
The most famous “eschatological” prophecy using the term
D771 TPN is from Isaiah 2. It states that in D'sT MINN the
Jerusalem Temple will be central, all nations will go there to get
divine instruction, and, most famously, “and they shall beat their
swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation
shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know
war” (2:4; see also Micah 5.3; Blenkinsopp 2000:190). This is a
prophecy that is meant to transpire in the future, D771 TPTNNA, but
there is nothing to suggest that this is the “end of time” (Steudel
1993; Martinez and Tigchalaar 1997:100).
In fact, even more revolutionary notions of what scholars
call the eschatological period do not imply an end of time. One such
radical notion is found at the end of Isaiah 65:17, describing a cre-
ation of a new heaven and earth (Childs 2001:439-49). The anony-
mous prophet clearly views this as a crucial event, but it is very much
in time—according to the following chapter, after this new creation,
“and new moon after new moon, And Sabbath after Sabbath, all flesh
shall come to worship Me—said the LORD” (66:22). These events
that follow this new creation are very much in, and not at the end of,
time.
In sum, those who depict biblical time as linear, with the
“end of time” as a goal or telos, are misreading the text. Prophetic lit-
erature presents a set of traditions that describe an ideal future that
in some distinctive ways—agriculturally, or in terms of world peace,
or in terms of animal behavior—will be fundamentally different. But
this is depicted as a long period, in which life is otherwise normal.
Furthermore, it is typically unclear if this period is to last forever.
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 123

Finally, it is noteworthy that even this type of eschatology is not pre-

dominant in the Bible. It is certainly strong in most prophetic tradi-
tions, but it is absent from Torah, historical books, Psalms, and the
wisdom strands, which make up the majority of biblical texts
(Petersen 1992:579). Stated differently, eschatological views do not
predominate in the Hebrew Bible, and even when they appear, they
are not eschatological in the etymological sense, suggesting an end.
Even when this period is depicted as radically different than
the author’s own period, it is often phrased not as a new final era, but
as a return to the old. This fundamental observation was made by the
great late 19th and early 20th century German Bible scholar,
Hermann Gunkel (1895), who observed that the end of time is
depicted as the beginning of time. Thus in Isaiah 65-66, explored
above, the ideal future is portrayed as a re-creation, where Genesis is
reenacted, and a new heavens and earth are fashioned (Fishbane
1985:354—356). Similarly, another well-known prophetic “eschato-
logical” text, Jeremiah 31:31, set O77 DMT CONN (“after those
days”) notes: “See, a time is coming (X°X2 O72" 11371)—declares the
LORD—when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel
and the House of Judah.” This vision of the future as well is not
viewed as something totally new, but as a reworking of the covenant
given to the Israelites at Sinai, but in a new form where it will be so
preprogrammed in every Israelite, so he or she will follow it auto-
matically (Carasik 1996). Here too, the future—not really the
end—is based on the past.
This notion, quite literally, brings us full circle, creating a
certain irony. There is no end of time (Greenberg 1983:145—47,
Collins 1993:337—38; Brin 2001:264—-76; Talmon 1993), but the
texts that describe the future often do so in terms of the past, and
thus view events as cyclical, or at least as recurring. In fact, Petersen
(1992) has summarized Israelite eschatological tradition by suggest-
ing that it is based on the patriarchal promise traditions of Genesis,
the David-Zion tradition concerning the centrality of the Davidic
monarch and the Jerusalem Temple, and Sinai covenant traditions
124 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

concerning the revelation of law on the mountain. Thus a broad

range of eschatological notions is really based on a broad range of
traditions about Israel’s early history.
It is difficult to talk about time as an abstraction since sec-
ond-order thinking was a late arrival during the biblical period. Thus,
it is not surprising that there is no extended philosophical reflection
on time and its nature. Ecclesiastes offers some thoughts and sug-
gests periodicity of events, and perhaps even a notion of cyclical
time. This idea is seen clearly in the book of Judges and in some other
biblical passages, though it does not typify the Deuteronomistic
History as a whole. Cyclical time, however, should not be contrast-
ed with teleological eschatological time. There is no “end of time”
according to the Bible. There are, however, various depictions of the
idealized future, and these are typically based on depictions of the
distant past. A cycle or, at the very least, a circle is created, through
which the past and future meet. This suggests that at least for some
biblical tradents, the notions of cyclical and teleological time are not
as mutually contradictory as we might have thought (Gould 1987:16;
Zerubavel 1981:112—13).

References

Ackerman, Susan. Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges

and Biblical Israel. Anchor Bible Reference Library. New
York: Doubleday, 1998.
Barr, James. The Semantics of Biblical Language. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1961, 102-104.

Becker, Uwe. Richterzeit and Konigtum: Redaktionsgeschechtlich Studien

zum Richterbuch. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fiir die alttesta-
mentliche Wissenschaft 192. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990.
Bellis, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes:Women’s Stories in the
Hebrew Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster /John Knox, 1994.
Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “Isaiah 1-39.” Anchor Bible 19. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 2000.
 CYCLICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL TIME IN THE HEBREW BIBLE 125

Brettler, Marc Zvi. The Book of Judges. Old Testament Readings.

London: Routledge, 2002.

——_—.. The Creation of History in Ancient Israel. London: Routledge, 1995.

Brin, Gershon, The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
Campbell, Antony F., and Mark A. O’Brien. Unfolding the
Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text.
Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000.

Carasik, Michael A. “Theologies of Mind in Biblical Israel.” Ph.D.

dissertation, Brandeis University, 1996.

Childs, Brevard S. Isaiah. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY:

Westminster /John Knox, 2001.
Collins, John J. Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Literature of
the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Routledge, 1997.

. Daniel. Hermeneia Commentary. Minneapolis, MN:

Fortress Press, 1993.

. “Eschatology.” In Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C.

Vanderkam, eds., Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 256-61.

Crenshaw, James L. “Ecclesiastes.” Anchor Bible Dictionary 2. New

York: Doubleday, 1992.
Curtis, John Briggs. “A Suggested Interpretation of Biblical
Philosophy of History.” Hebrew Union College Annual 34
(1963):115—23.
Dever, W. G. Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research.
Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1990.

Fishbane, Michel. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford:

Clarendon, 1985.

Fox, Michael V. A Time to Tear Down and A Time to Build Up:A Rereading
of Ecclesiastes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999.
126 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Frick, Frank S. “Palestine.” Anchor Bible Dictionary 5. New York:

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Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.
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the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Greenberg, Moshe. “Ezekiel 1-20.” Anchor Bible 22. New York:

Doubleday, 1983.
Greenspahn, Frederick E. “The Theology of the Framework of
Judges.” Vetus Testamentum 36 (1986):285—396.

Gunkel, Hermann. Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit.

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 e@6@e

TEMPORALITY AND THE FABRIC

OF SPACE-TIME IN EARLY
CHINESE [THOUGHT

David W. Pankenier

early fifty years ago Joseph Needham published a celebrated

| \ | essay, “Time and Knowledge in China and the West,” in
which he surveyed Chinese ideas about time and temporal-
ity. In his magisterial overview, Needham left virtually no realm
untouched in discussing time in Chinese philosophy and natural phi-
losophy; time, chronology, and historiography; time measurement;
biological change in time; concepts of social evolution and devolu-
tion; recognition of technological development over time; science
and knowledge as cooperative cumulative enterprises, and more.
The subject is vast, particularly in view of the historical
scope of Needham’s account, which carries the story from the first
historical dynasty up to the modern era. Indeed, each of the topics
Needham discusses merits a monograph. My objective here is briefly
to draw attention to a few of the general issues raised by Needham’s
conclusion concerning the position of Chinese civilization in the con-
trast between linear irreversible time and cyclical, recurring pat-
terns, and then to focus on a uniquely Chinese perspective on tem-
porality and causality.
130 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

When it comes to Chinese civilization, Needham (1981)

wrote,

Broadly speaking, and in spite of anything that has been said

above, linearity . . . dominated. The apocalyptic, almost the
messianic, often the evolutionary and (in its own way) the
progressive, certainly the temporally linear, these elements
were there, spontaneously and independently developing
since the time of the Shang kingdom [1554—1046 BCE], and
in spite of all that the Chinese found out or imagined about
cycles, celestial or terrestrial, these were the elements that
dominated the thought of Confucian scholars and the Taoist
peasant-farmers. Strange as it may seem to those who still
think in terms of the “timeless Orient,” on the whole China
was a culture more of the Irano-Judaeo-Christian type than
the Indo-Hellenic. (133, 135)

One of the most important indicators leading to Needham’s

conclusion, though only implicit in the rationale quoted here, is his
conviction, echoing the early French sinologist Marcel Granet, that
the Chinese possessed a more highly developed historical sense than
any other civilization (Needham and Wang 1956:289). Needham’s
essay generalized about the entire sweep of Chinese history. Had he
restricted his discussion to the ancient period, that is, taking the Han
dynasty at the beginning of the CE as his upper limit, it is unlikely he
would have concluded that linearity dominated Chinese thinking
about time. For example, Derk Bodde, in contrast to Needham, after
exploring the same question of cyclical versus linear time in China,
concludes: “Naturally, the evidence pro and con cannot be quantita-
tively weighed. Nonetheless, on the cyclical side, the evidence
appears to me quite sufficient in quantity and clarity to justify the
conclusion that, until quite recently, Chinese cyclical thinking was
considerably more widespread and influential than was Chinese lin-
ear thinking” (Bodde 1991:133; see also Sivin 1966).
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 131

Of particular interest in the Chinese case, as Needham

notes in discussing historical causation in the early imperial period,
is “the conviction that the universe and each of the wholes compos-
ing it have a cyclical nature, undergoing alternations, so dominated
[Chinese] thought that the idea of succession was always subordinat-
ed to that of interdependence. Thus retrospective explanations were
not felt to involve any difficulty. “Such and such a lord, in his lifetime,
was not able to obtain the hegemony, because, after his death, human
victims were sacrificed to him.’ Both facts were simply part of one
timeless pattern” (Needham and Wang 1956:289). Clearly, what is
implicated here is hardly a conventional notion of causality, much
less “historical sense” in any ordinary sense of the term, as Needham
points out (Needham and Wang 1956:97).
Lawrence Fagg, like Derk Bodde, is less inclined to declare
in favor of the dominance of continuous, linear time in China:

Certainly, if only because the Chinese were such accom-

plished historians, they must have had a sense of linear time.
This is apparent in their records of social relations and
events, and is particularly evident in astronomical calcula-
tions . . . at the same time, curiously, there was a compo-
nent of cyclicality in the Chinese view of political history,
the successive dynasties exhibiting a periodicity in their rise
and fall. There was a cyclical view also that arose from the
Chinese perception of nature and the functions of the
human body . . . strongly supported by Taoist concepts. It is
almost as if this mixture of linear and cyclical concepts of
time is another expression of the primal yin-yang principle,
with yang representing linear time and yin cyclical time.
(Fagg 1985:97)
It is no doubt a truism that no civilization has proceeded
from dominantly linear to dominantly cyclical conceptions of time,
rather than the other way round. Still, as Bodde’s and Needham’s
132 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

opposing conclusions illustrate, it is no easy matter to pin down how

and why a transition from the one to the other may have occurred or,
more precisely, how and when the situation of relative dominance
might have shifted from the one to the other of these complementa-
ry modes of experiencing time. In China, a significant factor may
have been the consolidation of the imperial institution during the
two centuries before the Common Era, and especially its union of
convenience with Confucianism. The ascendancy of the latter, with
its deep commitment to social and political history, assured that
ancient and more subtle Taoist and Naturalist conceptions of pattern
and phenomenological connectedness would be relegated to special-
ized pursuits, and with them their intense interest in timeliness,
“returning” as the movement of the Tao, and especially “ideas of
causality distinctly different from the Indian or Western atomistic
picture in which the prior impact of one thing is the cause of the
motion of another” (Needham 1981:97). In other words, the deval-
uation of the correlative cosmology of the Naturalists and of Taoist
intuitive attunement with the timeless patterns of the cosmos meant
that the synthesis of these concepts of causality and temporality,
which were, strictly speaking, neither cyclical nor linear, would
never be fully elaborated (see Huang and Ziircher 1995).
A famous passage from the 4th century BCE narrative his-
tory Zuo zhuan, now preserved as a commentary on the canonical
Spring and Autumn Annals, offers a taste of the time-sense in the mid-
1st millennium BCE.

In the 2nd month, on day guiwei [20], the [dowager] mar-

chioness Dao of Jin entertained all the men who had been
engaged in the walling of Qi. A childless old man from the
District of Jiang went and took his place at the feast. Some
participants were dubious about his age and would have him
tell it. He said, “I am a lowly person and do not know how
to keep track of the years (bu zhi ji nian). Since the year of
my birth, on day jiazi [1], the day of the new moon in the
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 133

first month, there have elapsed 445 jiazi days, and finally
until today one-third of the cycle [of 60].” The officiants [of
the feast] ran to the court to ask about it. Music-master
Kuang said, “It was the year when Shuzhong Hui Bo of Lu
had a meeting with Xi Chengzi in Chengkuang. In that year,
the Di invaded Lu, and Shusun Zhuangshu defeated them at
Xian, capturing their elders Qiaoru, Hui, and Pao, after all
of whom he named his sons. [Hence,] it is 73 years.” (Legge
IX:556, modified)

Several things are noteworthy in this passage. First, more

sophisticated time-keeping methods than counting the cycles of 60
are inaccessible to the free man commoner, and probably only slight-
ly less so to other nonspecialist participants at the feast. (Note that
the old man uses ji nian, literally “string the years,” to mean “corre-
late the sequence of years with a record of political events/states of
the world.”) Second, the specialist who is in charge of record keep-
ing at court, who is also music-master and very likely diviner as well,
in the first instance places the timing of the man’s birth situationally,
almost as if quoting an annalistic record, and then secondarily, only
after an arithmetic operation relating the continuously repeating sex-
agenary cycle to the civil years, is he able to fix the event chronolog-
ically.
This account is probably fairly representative and gives a
good indication of the relative value attached to different kinds of
temporal awareness in daily life. It also points up a central problem
at the heart of temporal consciousness to which the Book of Changes
seemed to offer a solution, as we shall see; that is, how to systemat-
ically relate subjective mental states or states of the world with an
often contradictory description of the world in terms of events hap-
pening, or the “unreality of time” (Davies 2002:42).
Here is another, elite perspective on attunement as a vital
concern of the ruler who aspired to achieve universal harmony and
hegemony, lest his negligence or ineptitude provoke disasters. The
134 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

admonition is attributed to the chief minister of the first Hegemon,

Duke Huan of the state of Qi, in the 7th century BCE:

Since mankind is one entity within nature, the one who

establishes the laws must also make a study of “heavenly
timeliness and earthly advantages” as a basis for devising his
laws. Kuan Tzu said: “Commands have their proper times . .
. the Sage King strives to adjust to time, and to relate his
governmental measures to it.” Spring, summer, autumn, and
winter each has its activities which should be done at those
times. “When man and heaven are in accord, only then can
the perfection of heaven and earth come into being.” When
commands and orders are not appropriate to the season,
then “things undertaken will not get accomplished, and
there is sure to be a great calamity.” (Hsiao 1979:337)

During the last few centuries before the beginning of the

present era old traditions and new speculations about the connected-
ness of all things were increasingly systematized and elaborated, not
least by Yin- Yang correlative cosmologists, the School of Naturalists,
and propounders of Taoist-inspired Lao-Huang theories of rulership.
These ideas drew on ancient roots in divination methods deriving
from microcosmic-macrocosmic analogies, numerology, cosmo-
political theories of cyclical dominance by the five elemental
agents—wood, metal, fire, water, and earth—coupled with a highly
developed sensitivity to phenomenological correspondences per-
ceived to exist in nature. The historical sense displayed a strong bias
in favor of cyclical time and historical events seen not as historical
instances of human actions and motives per se, but in their timeless,
emblematic aspect, as examples of admirable or dishonorable
motives, or adherence to protocol and tradition-bound propriety.
This quality of annalistic history, the beginnings of which are already
discernible during Shang and Zhou a millennium earlier, is attribut-
able to the origins of historical record keeping in the context of div-
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 135

ination and ritualistic reporting of temporal goings-on to the ances-

tors.
By the early imperial period, the responsibilities of the
Astrologer Royal, the official post which had evolved out of the
diviners of old, encompassed everything from divination to porten-
tology (including astrology and the interpretation of anomalous
events and prodigies), to calendar making and advising on the rele-
vance of historical precedent to current events. Rulership demanded
mastery of the complex pattern of events and motives, both human
and natural, in order to successfully manage their harmonization
with the inchoate and constantly changing complexion of the times
(Nienhauser 1994:165). Take, for example, the characterization of
this enterprise by the philosopher Jia Yi, in the early 2nd century
BCE:

A popular maxim has it: “Prior events, not forgotten, teach

about events to come.” For this reason, in ordering the state
the accomplished ruler observes the events of antiquity,
tests them against the present, matches them with human
affairs, examines into the principles of flourishing and
decline, and looks for what is appropriate according to
expediency and tendencies. In this way, discarding and
adopting measures have their proper sequence, adapting and
transforming their due seasons. Thus, his reign is untroubled
and enduring, and his altars to the soil and grain are safe-
guarded. (Sima Qian 1959:6.278)

Here is the historical sense in the service of statecraft, and

statecraft according to a cosmic paradigm in which the very cycles of
the cosmos and the movements of Yin- Yang and the five phases are all
implicated. In this world view, disturbance or disharmony at any
point in the fabric of space-time or human affairs could reverberate
throughout the whole, with unpredictable consequences—and not
merely prospectively, but perhaps even retrospectively as we saw
136 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

above. A pervasive early metaphor employed in this connection is

that of a mirror, the aspiring ruler of men being enjoined to seek
guidance in the image of his deeds and motives as reflected in the
mirror of previous reigns as well as in the lives of his own subjects.
In attempting to grasp what this world view was like, we
need to eschew conventional ideas of causality. Even words like
“reverberate” or “propagate” above tend to call to mind convention-
al ideas of action and reaction and to invoke a presentist perspec-
tive. Rather, what is implicated here is a kind of “acausal ordered-
ness,” in which, as Needham says, the “idea of correspondence has
great significance and replaces the idea of causality, for things are
connected rather than caused.” Or, in Needham’s inimitable phrase,
“in such a system causality is reticular and hierarchically fluctuat-
ing, not particulate and singly catenarian” (Needham and Wang
1956:289). In explaining Granet’s interpretation, Needham
remarks, “if two objects seemed to them to be connected, it was
not by means of a cause and effect relationship, but rather ‘paired’
like the obverse and reverse of something, or to use a metaphor
from the Book of Changes, like echo and sound, or shadow and light”
(1956:290—91). “What Granet had in mind were patterns simultane-
ously appearing in a vast field of force, the dynamic structure of which
we do not yet understand. . . . The parts, in their organizational
relations, whether of a living body or of the universe, were suffi-
cient to account, by a kind of harmony of wills, for the observed
phenomena” (1956:302).
Number, too, plays a crucial role in this conception:

In China numbers were used as qualitative instruments of

order. According to Granet, the Chinese did not use num-
bers as quantities but as polyvalent emblems or symbols
which served to express the quality of certain clusters of
facts and their intrinsic hierarchical orderedness. Numbers,
in their view, possess a descriptive power and thus serve as
an ordering fact for “clusters of concrete objects, which they
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 137

seem to qualify merely by positioning them in space and

time.” In Chinese thought there is an equivalence between
the essence of a thing and its position in space-time.
(Needham and Wang 1956:229)

This idealized role of number achieves its highest expres-

sion in the elaborate system of the Book of Changes in which the 64
individual hexagrams give graphic shape to the symbolic descriptive
power of numerical relations, while at the same time embodying, in
their dynamic relations, the infinite changeability and creative poten-
tial of the cosmos. According to C. G. Jung:

Number . . . is a more primitive mental element than con-

cept. Psychologically we could define number as an archetype
of order which has become conscious. . . . the unconscious often
uses number as an ordering factor much in the same way as
consciousness does. Thus numerical orders, like all other
archetypal structures, can be pre-existent to consciousness
and then they rather condition than are conditioned by it.
Number forms an ideal tertium comparationis between what
we usually call psyche and matter, for countable quantity is a
characteristic of material phenomena and an irreducible idée
force behind our mathematical reasoning. The latter consists
of the “indisputability” which we experience when contem-
plating arrangements based on natural numbers. Thus num-
ber is a basic element in our thought processes, on the one
side, and, on the other, it appears as the objective “quantity”
of material objects which seem to exist independently out-
side our psyche.” (Jung 1969:870)

Needham, the materialist, in contrast, saw the Chinese ten-

dency to rest content with the apparent explanatory power of num-
ber as the chief impediment to further development in the philoso-
phy of the Book of Changes.
138 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

As Lawrence Fagg observed: “The I Ching (Book of Changes)

tells us that each moment can be denoted by a number indicative of
the quality of that moment. Therefore, while there is in a real sense
a value placed on the moments of Chinese linear time, it is not obvi-
ously goal-directed or influenced. Hence, this time also may not be
easily identified with the physical world’s historical arrow”
(1985:155). In this regard it is also worth mentioning that some days
in the cycle of 60 day-dates in continuous use since Shang times were
more auspicious than others, often because of punning associations
with homophones having lucky significance. Remarkably, the identi-
ty of this set of favorable and unfavorable terms persisted largely
unchanged throughout the pre-imperial period from Shang through
the Han. In discussing this aspect of the day-dates divined about in
the late 2nd millennium BCE Shang oracle bones, David Keightley
(2000) cites Clifford Geertz’s observation that the Balinese “don’t
tell you what time it is, they tell you what kind of time it is” (33,
n.55).
An illustration of the intersection of timeless pattern and
dynamism in the Book of Changes shows how this distillation of early
Chinese thinking about change and timeliness can enlighten us about
views of temporality and causation as well as about certain other pre-
figurative metaphors in ancient Chinese thought. In the Book of
Changes, where the tenor of the moment is a function of position, and
vice versa, the concept of the right timeliness of every action is espe-
cially prominent and repeatedly stressed (Lin 1995:98). Small won-
der, then, that a preoccupation with not encountering receptive
times or meeting with unfavorable circumstances, seemingly preor-
dained to frustrate one’s ambitions, should have loomed large in the
minds of Chinese thinkers in the late Warring States and Han peri-
ods, especially given the troubling precedent of Confucius’s own fail-
ure to achieve due recognition in his day. At one point in a famous fu
or prose poem on the theme of “Gentlemen of Integrity
Unappreciated in their Time,” the most influential Confucian thinker
of the former Han dynasty, Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179—104 BCE), was
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 139

deeply influenced by the Book of Changes:

Alas, the whole world goes along with perversity! I grieve

that we cannot join together in turning back.
What else can I do but return to the constant task, and not
let myself be cast about by the times.
Though all profit be gained by violating the true self, still it
is better to straighten the mind and cleave to the
good.
If only the buffeting of urgency causes me to be moved,
surely I cannot be said to have an intemperate
nature?
Clearly manifesting “Fellowship with Men” means “Possession in
Great Measure.”
And to brightly show forth the “radiance of modesty,” means
to further the cause. (Pankenier 1990:440)

“Tong ren” (“Fellowship with Men”) and “Da you”

(“Possession in Great Measure”) are hexagrams thirteen and fourteen
in the received text of the Book of Changes. Their pivotal importance
in the Han Confucian interpretation of the Changes is second only to
the first two, “Qian” (“The Creative”) and “Kun” (“The Receptive”),
in that they symbolize, at one and the same time, the means (human-
ism and self-cultivation) and the end (political unity and social har-
mony) of the Confucian social and political agenda. In terms of their
structure, there was thought to obtain an intrinsically dynamic rela-
tionship among the central ideas and images embodied in these two
hexagrams, a relationship that is represented graphically in their con-
figuration. These are two of the very few hexagrams that have a com-
plementary pair of Yin and Yang lines occupying the two central,
mutually interacting and supremely important positions in the hexa-
gram—the second and fifth lines. Traditionally, the second line is
associated with the concept “subordinate” and the fifth line with that
of “superior” or “ruler.” In both cases, then, we have a representation
140 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

of the ideal situation in which a yielding, or receptive line and an

assertive, or creative line finds its counterpart in precisely the right
location. Both hexagrams therefore symbolize the ideal relationship
of wise ruler paired with a sage advisor, but in two different aspects.
That is not all, however, because the two hexagrams are also
mirror images of each other, denoted by the term zong. [Figure 6.1]
Deriving from the craft of weaving, this term originally referred to
the tying of the longitudinal threads to the harnesses that alternately
raise and lower the warp threads in different configurations to create
the patterns in the weave. What this means in the case of Tong ren and
Da you is that the one is immanent in the other, the one simultane-
ously is the other. Through the dynamics of their unique relationship
the Yin line in the second place in “Fellowship with Men” advances to
the ruling place in “Possession in Great Measure.” In terms of the
Changes, therefore, in a very real sense, “Possession in Great
Measure” is immanent in “Fellowship with Men.” Though portrayed
graphically in linear fashion, and elaborated sequentially, in reality
the elements and number symbolism of the one are the mirror image
of the other.
In his prose poem Dong Zhongshu expressed this dynamic
relationship linguistically by linking the two emblematic hexagrams
by means of the coordinating conjunction er, thereby displaying the
reciprocal dynamics embodied in the two hexagrams by means of a
linear verbal representation. In this way Dong was able to convey
immanence and complementarity syntactically. In other words,
implicit in achieving “Fellowship with Men” is the realization of
“Possession in Great Measure,” which here refers to ascendancy to
rulership of the empire. The “yielding” virtue of the superior man in
a subordinate position rises to occupy the central and ruling place by
virtue of his ability to expand the principles of Fellowship from the
few to the many. In the language of the commentary, “the yielding
finds its place, finds the middle, and the Creative corresponds with
it; this means Fellowship with Men. . . . Only the superior man is
able to unite the wills of all under heaven” (Wilhelm 1981:452),
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 141

The term zong for the mirror-image relationship between

the two hexagrams “Unifying Men” and “Possession in Great
Measure,” like many of the most important metaphors in ancient
Chinese philosophy relating to time and order, is drawn from
cordage and the art of weaving, Other terms include ji gang (“fixed
positions and motions with regard to other things in the web of
Nature’s relationships”) (Needham and Wang 1956:555). This term is
made up of ji (“leading thread, put in order” and by extension “keep
time, chronicle of years, annals, period of years, 12-year cycle”); and
gang (“cord forming the selvedge of a net; regulate; maintain in
order; direct”). More concretely, the two terms are suggestive of an
ancient record-keeping device structured like the Inka quippu which
was said to have preceded the invention of writing in China. Defining
ji as it applies to time, Michael Loewe stresses a linear view: “the
term chi, or thread, suggests the line that is formed by a series of suc-
cessive incidents or segments” (Loewe 1995:312). However, ji is
equally frequently used to refer to constant periodicities such as
those of the planets, especially Jupiter, or basic recurring cycles in
calendrical calculations.
By far the most important of these terms from the weaver’s
craft are ching and wei. Jing is “the warp of a piece of woven goods,”
by extension “constant, order-giving principles; canonical text,” and
in our own day “meridian of longitude.” Wei in contrast, are the “weft
threads of a piece of woven goods,” “the visible planets” which shut-
tle back and forth across the sky in opposition to the apparent east to
west motion of the stars, “apocryphal, unorthodox commentaries on
the Confucian canon,” and in modern times “parallel of latitude.” In
the present context, zong is evocative of a fabric of relationships, made
up of warp and weft, sequentially linear though recursive in the making
(not unlike the hexagrams themselves and the numerical manipula-
tions employed to derive them), but whose full composition and
import can only be grasped in the totality of their complex pattern-
ing. The fabric of relations and philosophical ideals evoked exhibits a
complementarity of principle and pattern, any segment of which is
142 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

capable of invoking the whole tapestry. Again, it is not that the two
hexagrams are linked as cause and effect, or that one brings the other
into being. Rather, the one is simultaneously the other like the front
and back of silk brocade.
With this in mind, consider the following explanation of
dynastic prosperity and decline by the late Han scholar and icono-
clast Wang Chong: “When the mandate of heaven [tian ming] is
about to be launched, and a Sage-King is on the point of emerg-
ing, the material forces (qi), before and after the event, give proofs
which will be radiantly manifest” (Hsiao 1979:594). Compare this
with Dong Zhongshu’s view a century and a half earlier: “Your ser-
vant has heard that in heaven’s great conferring of responsibilities
on the king there is something that human powers of themselves
could not achieve, but that comes of itself. This is the sign that the
Mandate [ming] has been granted. The people of the empire with
one heart all turn to him as they would turn to their fathers and
mothers. Thus it is that heaven’s auspicious signs respond to [the
people's] sincerity and come forth.” Even in Wang Chong’s time,
the principle of causality invoked here in relation to auspicious
portents tended to be understood simplistically by “mere prognos-
ticators” in terms of cause and effect: “The errors of the School of
Prognosticators are not in acknowledging the occurrences of
calamities and auspicious happenings, but lie in their erroneous
belief that the successes and failings of government bear a cause
and effect relationship to those.”
According to Wang, however,

The accession of a worthy ruler happens to occur in an age

that is going to be well governed; his virtues are self-evident
above, and the people are automatically good below. The
world is at peace and the people are secure. Auspicious signs
all display themselves and the age speaks of those as induced
by the worthy ruler. The immoral ruler happens to be born
at a time when chaos is to exist; the empire is thrown into
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 143

troubles and the people’s ways become disorderly, with

unending disasters and calamities, leading to the fall of the
state, the death of the ruler, and the displacement of his suc-
cessors. The world all refers to that as having been induced
by his evils. Such observations are clear about the external
appearance of good and evil, but fail to perceive the internal
reality of good and bad fortune. (Hsiao 1979:594)

In this view all the actions of an individual or an undertak-

ing which is about to flourish will spontaneously accord with the
timely factors of fate or ming (same term as ming “mandate” above).
In the case of an emerging Sage King: “Followers will come to him
unsummoned, and auspicious objects will come to him unsignaled.
Invisibly moved, they will all arrive in concert as if sent” (Hsiao
1979:595). This is what Granet was referring to when he spoke of
“patterns simultaneously appearing in a vast field of force,” and Jung
(1969) too, who stressed that the Chinese world-outlook involved a
causality principle quite unlike that of Galilean-Newtonian science,
which he denoted “synchronistic.”
In linguistic terms, classical Chinese is tenseless, so
temporal relations are somewhat fluid and typically marked con-
textually by the use of aspect particles and explicit time words.
Indeed, aspect is one of the most difficult features of Chinese for
the non-native speaker to master. Taken together, the two factors
seem to militate in favor of a relative devaluation of precision
when it comes to temporal indications, in favor of relational or
situational content. This characteristic, like the account of the
aged commoner at the feast, and Clifford Geertz’s remark about
“what kind of time it is” in Bali, brings to mind another sugges-
tive parallel from the anthropological literature, an account of
the cognitive devaluation of linear time among the Trobriand
islanders first documented by Jacob Malinowski. Consider the
following description of Trobriand concepts of time and tempo-
rality:
144 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

There is no boundary between past Trobriand experience

and the present; he can indicate that an action is completed,
but this does not mean that the action is past; it may be
completed and present or timeless. Where we would say
“Many years ago” and use the past tense, the Trobriander
would say, “In my father’s childhood” and use non-temporal
verbs; he places the event situationally, not temporally. Past,
present, and future are presented linguistically as the same,
are present in his existence, and sameness with what we call
the past and with myth, represents value to the Trobriander.
... lemporality is meaningless . . . no tenses, no linguistic
distinction between past or present. . . no arrangement of
activities or events into means and ends, no causal or teleo-
logic relationships. What we consider a causal relationship in
a sequence of connected events, is to the Trobriander an
ingredient of a patterned whole. ...
There is organization or rather coherence in their acts
because Trobriand activity is patterned activity. One act
within this pattern brings into existence a pre-ordained
cluster of acts. Perhaps one might find a parallel in our cul-
ture in the making of a sweater. When I embark on knitting
one, the ribbing at the bottom does not cause the making of
the neckline, nor of the sleeves or the armholes; and it is
not part of a lineal series of acts. Rather it is an indispensa-
ble part of a patterned activity which includes all these
other acts. . . . Trobriand islanders experience reality in
nonlinear pattern because this is the valued reality. (Lee
1979:132, 135-36)

While the Trobriand islands are not China, one cannot help
but be struck by the anthropologist’s account of the Trobriander’s
valuation of a particular kind of reality and the homely knitting anal-
ogy. Perhaps in this description of the cultural devaluation of tempo-
 EARLY CHINESE THOUGHT 145

rally structured narrative in favor of patterned relations and activity,

we can gain an inkling of the cultural predisposition that prefigured
the Chinese metaphorical recourse to the art of weaving. To the
extent this is so, the early Chinese synthesis of the complementary
aspects of time into an all-embracing fabric of acausal, patterned
orderedness, far from being a metaphysical innovation of the imme-
diate pre-imperial period, like many down-to-earth images in the
Book of Changes, owes much to conceptual predispositions that hark
back to China’s archaic past.

References

Bodde, Derk. Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and
Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-modern China.
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1991, 122-33.
Davies, Paul. “That Mysterious Flow.” Scientific American 287, 3
(September 2002):42.
Fagg, Lawrence W. Two Faces of Time. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical
Publishing House, 1985.

Hsiao, Kung-chuan. History of Chinese Political Thought, trans. F. W.

Mote. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Huang, Chun-Chieh, and Erik Zircher, eds., Time and Space in

Chinese Culture. Leiden: Brill, 1995.

Jung, C. G. “Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle.” In

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 2nd ed. Vol. 8: The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1969.

Lee, Dorothy. “Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Nonlineal.” In

R. E. Ornstein, ed., The Nature of Human Consciousness, San
Francisco, CA: Freemann, 1973, 128—42.

Legge, James. Zuo zhuan. London: Trubner, 1861-72.

146 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Lin, Li-chen. “The Concepts of Time and Position in the Book of

Change and their Development.” In Chun-Chieh Huang
and Erik Zurcher, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Culture.
Leiden: Brill, 1995, 89-113.
Loewe, Michael. “The Cycle of Cathay: Concepts of Time in Han
China and their Problems.” In Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik
Zurcher, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Culture. Leiden:
Brill, 1995, 305-28.
Keightley, David. The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community
in Late Shang China (ca. 1200-1045 B.C.). Berkeley, CA:
Institute of East Asian Studies, 2000.

Needham, Joseph. “Time and Knowledge in China and the West.” In

J.T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of Time:A Cooperative Survey of
Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the
Humanities 2nd ed. Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1981, 133.
Needham, Joseph, and Wang Ling. Science and Civilisation in China 2.
History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1956.

Nienhauser,
W. H., ed. The Grand Scribe’s Records 1. The Basic Annals of Pre-
Han China. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Pankenier, David W. “The Scholar’s Frustration Reconsidered:
Melancholia or Credo?” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 110, 3 (1990):440.
Sima Qian. Shiji. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.
Sivin, Nathan. “Chinese Conceptions of Time.” Earlham Review 1
(1966):82-92,
Wilhelm, Richard. The I Ching or Book of Changes, rendered into
English by Cary F. Baynes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981.
 1 @e

TTOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME
IN HESIOD

Alex Purves

n the late 8th century BCE, two poems attributed to the Greek
| poet Hesiod approached the structure and order of time from
two different points of view. In the Theogony, an epic poem
describing the evolution of the cosmos, Hesiod presents time as a lin-
ear construct, plotted upon a genealogical, diachronic history that
runs from the birth of the gods to the present order of the universe.
In the Works and Days, a didactic poem that instructs the reader on the
correct way to manage a farm and a household, the poet focuses on
the circular motion of time, as it is relayed through the cyclical pat-
tern of seasons, months, and days. The two different temporalities
that these poems engage in are in large part prescribed by their
marked difference in genre; epic time will necessarily run according
to a different logic than didactic, just as historical time will flow at a
different rate to seasonal time (Strohm 2000:80—96; Koselleck
1985; Nowotny 1994). But while the temporalities of the two poems
are largely separate, they also converge to offer new insights on, and
new approaches to, the Hesiodic conception and construction of
time.
148 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

This chapter will be mostly concerned with explicating the

organization of time in the Theogony, but will begin by considering
how the Works and Days sets certain prescriptions for time that may
guide us in our reading of Hesiod in general. In both works, we shall
seek to uncover the ways in which Hesiod contrives to hold time in
abeyance through the domestic or agrarian metaphor of preserving
goods in jars beneath the earth. Ultimately, this will lead to an argu-
ment for a spatial understanding of time in the Theogony, in which
different temporal registers, such as the future and the past, are
“stored” underground. By reading the time of the Theogony’s plot
according to a topography of multiple dimensions, moreover, this
paper aims to recover that sense of depth-within-time which schol-
ars such as Erich Auerbach have sought to deny for ancient Greek
epic.
Much of the Works and Days is concerned with training the
farmer to recognize the correct times at which to carry out particu-
lar jobs (Leclerc 1994). Often these signs will point to times within
a season or year (when the Sirius star begins to wane by day, start the
wood-cutting—Works and Days 417—22; when the first crane flies
overhead on its winter migration, fatten up the oxen for the fields—
Works and Days 448--52). Toward the end of the poem there is also a
section on the suitability of different days of the month for different
events. The 12th day is good for a woman to set up her weaving, for
example, the 4th propitious for marriage, the 13th bad for sowing
crops (Works and Days 779, 800, 780-81). The Works and Days can thus
be regarded as an elaborate set of instructions on how to seize the
present moment, for each event—as a dpiov Epyov, or seasonal
task—has its own precise point of timeliness within the ordered
scheme of the Hesiodic calendar (641-42, 392ff., 422, 616-17,
697).
But this impulse toward grasping the ever-fleeting
immediacy of the “right time” is countered by a more general
thread that runs the poem, and that is the need to constantly live
not in the present, but rather just one step ahead of it.
Figure 7.1 Early Iron Age pithos base in situ, pithos 2, TR61/62, Torone Chalkidike, cour-
tesy of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, Sydney, Australia.
‘DIyDIISNY ‘KaupAs ‘suayip 7D aInqtysuy [potBoyoapya1y UDI]DIISNy ay7 fo Asaqanoo ‘pa1oysal 7 soysid aBy uosy ApiDy ZL ainBry
 ‘pypuisny ‘Aaupds ‘suayTP ID aInqiysu]
jootBoroapyaap uvipousny 2y1 fo Asaqanoa ‘ayrpryrpy) auosoy ‘ps yy ‘nds ur asog soynd aby uoy Apwq ¢z ainbry
152 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Throughout the Works and Days, Hesiod urges his audience to look
forward consistently to, and to provide for, the unforeseeable
future. There is a need, in other words, to ration out the pres-
ent—to spread it thin over the less productive seasons of the year.
The poet recommends doing this by storing up grain and wine in
large jars (called variously trifot and Gyyea), which—along with
a well-stocked granary—should only be broken open at certain
specified times (cf. Works and Days 30-32, 93, 306-307, 361-63,
368-69, 411-12, 475, 498-504, 819). During his account of the
threshing season, the poet advises the farmer to “transfer your
grain into jars, using a measuring scoop/ Then store all your
livelihood up and lock it in the house” (Works and Days 600-601),
just as, during the vintage season, he calls for the farmer to draw
wine into jars [eis Gyye’ aqvoai and preserve it for a later date
(Works and Days 613—14).
Through the simple, everyday mechanism of the jar,
Hesiod takes steps toward dividing time into the separate cate-
gories of past, present, and future. Its space thus serves as a “hold-
ing bay” for the present, or for the present-as-yet-unspent, a kind
of container of time. This is not unlike Salman Rushdie’s compar-
ison of time to chutney in Midnight’s Children (1980), whose nar-
rator cooks pickles by day and writes history by night. As he puts
it: “by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets,
I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well
as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks” (38).
Hesiod too, in his book about the management not of history but
of the continuous cycle of the year, comments on the practice of
“archiving”—-of preserving what in the present will soon be “past”
for a new time in the future.
In his narration of the story of Pandora, near the begin-
ning of the Works and Days, Hesiod expands upon the temporal
significance of the jar. For it is in opening the pithos given to her
by Zeus that Pandora creates a new space in time, what Hesiod
elsewhere calls the “iron age” of men:
 TTOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 153

Trpiv pev yap CaeoKov ett xGovi MUA’ avOpcaticov gO

voogiv aTEP TE KAKGV Kal GTEP XAAETIOIO TrOVOLO
vouowy T apyadéov al T avdpaoi kijpas gaKxav- 92
GAAG yuvi xeipecoi TiBou Heya TOW ApeAotioa 94
éoxedao’ - avOpctroio: 8’ Eurjoato Kndea Auypa. 95
youvn 8 autd@i 'EAtris ev appyKktoic: 56,0101
Evdov guuive triBou wird xeiAcowv, ode bupale
eFetrty WedoGev yap etreuBade rca TriBo1o
aiytoxou BouArjot Aids vepeAnyepeTao.

[For before that time, the race of men who lived upon the earth
Were far from evils, grievous toil,
And the baneful diseases which bring death to men.
But the woman removed the great lid of the jar with her hands,
Scattering them all. And she brought hard sorrows to mankind.
Hope alone remained there in its well-built house,
It stayed inside the jar, beneath the lip, nor did it fly outside
Before she put the lid of the jar back on,
By the plan of aegis-bearing, cloud-gathering Zeus.]
(Works and Days 90-99)

Between trplv and trpda8ev (both words meaning “before”),

Pandora opens up a new region in time as she opens up the space of
the jar. For, in the gap between these two temporal adverbs, the race
of iron is created (Works and Days 174ff), forever caught in the cycle of
mortal birth and death which hovers in the brief period between the
opening and shutting of the jar. It is not only disease and sorrows that
Pandora allows to escape by lifting the lid of her pithos, but time as
well, resigning humans to a fate trapped between the hedges of the
past and future, in a present which is to be spent and re-spent in a
continuous cycle.
For the generation that Pandora creates, the ability to see
beyond the present will forever be blinded by forgetfulness (see Detienne
1996:85—-86; Nagy 1992; Thalmann 1984:147-48; Walsh 1984:22—36;
154 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Pucci 1977:22—27; Cole 1983; Vernant 1983), in one direction, and hope
in the other, two factors that, for Hesiod, symbolize the mortal condition,
or “iron age” (Works and Days 986-87; Pucci 1977:103—105). It is hope
alone that remains for humans, trapped within the rim of Pandora’s jar.
Hesiod’s insistent reminder to preserve for the future thus
reads as a corrective to Pandora’s act, by ensuring that the lid of the
farmer’s jar is not opened before its time: “open a jar on the fourth
day” (Works and Days 819-20), “Satisfy yourself from the jar at the
beginning and end / But hold off in the middle” (368—69), “So the
ripe ears of corn may nod towards the ground/ If Olympian Zeus
should grant you such a fortunate outcome in the future/ And then
you may brush the cobwebs from your storage jars” (473—75). As
Hesiod explains it, hope is a deceptive means of providing for the
future, because it obscures the crucial difference between that which
still is (€11) and that which always is (aiet):

éAtris 8° ovK ayabh Kexpnuéevov avdpa KouiCew

HuEvov ev AEoxT, Td Ut Bios ApKios ein.
Seikvue 5€ Saeco Vepeos ETI "ECOOU EOVTOS:
“ouk aici BEpos Eooeitar troieto8e KaAias.”

[Hope is not good at providing for a needy man,

Idling in the lounge, when his livelihood is not secure.
Point out to your workers when it is still [E71] the middle of summer,
“It will not always aici be summer. Build your granaries!”]
(Works and Days 500-503)

Hesiod’s use of granaries, store houses, and jars as mecha-

nisms for regulating time in the Works and Days speaks to a human
attempt to outdo, or at least——by explicitly reversing Pandora’s
act—to undo, the limited temporal horizons of mortals in the age of
iron. In the Theogony, it is possible to push this concept of “stored
time” further and, in so doing, to uncover some of the central prob-
lems that the modern critic has faced in his approach to epic time.
 TTOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 155

The Theogony deals not with the limited range of human

time, but rather with the expansive and conflicting temporalities
of divine mythology. Hesiod’s history of the cosmos begins with
the emergence of the earth, Gaia, from the undefined matter of
Chaos. Gaia then partners with the sky (Ouranos). Ouranos,
however, attempts to block the release of Gaia’s progeny by con-
tinually covering her in the act of intercourse, until his son,
Kronos, castrates him from inside his mother’s womb. At this
point, Ouranos is deposed and Kronos marries his sister, Rhea.
Again, though, in an attempt to ward off the succession of future
children, Kronos swallows each of his offspring as soon as they
are born. Zeus, the last child, survives because his mother hides
him in a cave and tricks Kronos into consuming a stone instead.
He too thereby deposes his father, but here the diachronic
sequence of history stops. For Zeus successfully swallows his
pregnant wife, Metis, and gives birth to the virgin Athena through
his head, thus bringing the line of female procreation (and filial
succession) to an end.
The central problem of the Theogony lies in reconciling this
diachronic genealogy of the gods with the synchronic, eternal pres-
ent ushered in by Zeus, who alone of the immortals manages suc-
cessfully to put a halt to the progression of time. For Zeus not only
overcomes the older gods of the past, but he also, by swallowing
both offspring and wife, transforms his own body into a container
that holds the future indefinitely in reserve.
How, then, do the categories of the past and the future fit
within a divine time scheme where that which is “always”
(atei/ av) stretches elastically from one end of Zeus’ rule to the
other? Furthermore, how do we reconcile Zeus and the race of
gods who are repeatedly described as those “who always are” with
the human temporalities of birth, death, and narrative? Hesiod
acknowledges the problem at the very beginning of the Theogony, in
his account of the initiation he first received from the Muses on
Mount Helicon:
156 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

éveTrvevoay dé pot avdhv

Bgotnv, iva KAEiont Ta T EGOOLEVa TIPS T’ EOVTA,
kai pW exeAové’ upvery Wakapoov yévos aitv EdvToov,
opas 8’ autas 1pdTdév Te kal Votatov aiév ceiderv.

[They breathed into me a divine voice,

In order that I might celebrate the things of the future and the past
And they bid me to hymn the race of the gods who always (ai€v) are
But to sing always (aiév) of themselves both first and last.]
(Theogony 31—34)

The emphasis in these lines on the voice and its ability to

tell a story draws attention to the role of narrative in framing the dis-
cordance between the unbroken timeline signaled by aiév, on the
one hand, and the division of time into a temporal sequence (“the
things of the future and the past”; “first and last”) on the other. The
Muses confront Hesiod with two different versions of time at
once—one which is static and all-encompassing, the other which
travels like an arrow from the past to the future. But what exactly do
the Muses mean when they instruct Hesiod to sing of the “future” and
the “past” in this context? Although they acknowledge that narrative
must always be organized into a temporal frame that runs in
sequence from “first” to “last,” the Muses also present Hesiod with a
time span within which the categories of past and future should tech-
nically no longer have a place, since they have been consumed and
flattened out into the eternal “now” of Zeus’ rule.
It is precisely this concept of a unilateral, all-pervasive pres-
ent that Eric Auerbach argued constituted the primary characteristic
of archaic Greek epic. In his famous reading of Odysseus’s scar,
Auerbach (1953) insisted that every scene in Homer “knows only a
foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective pres-
ent” (7). He consistently uses terms such as “illumination,” “clear,”
“light,” and “visible” to describe the effects of this epic present, and
 TOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 157

his reading excludes, quite forcefully, all hints of the shadow or depth
that emerge from what he calls “the darkness of the past”: “Homer
will not [let Odysseus’s scar] appear out of the darkness of an unillu-
minated past; it must be set in full light. . . Never is there a form left
fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a
glimpse of unplumbed depths” (6—7).
A similar resistance to the spatial “layering” of time can be
found in the work of the Polish Classicist Thaddaeus Zielinski,
whose treatment of plot in ancient epic is founded upon the con-
cept of events stretched out upon a single, two-dimensional plane.
In 1901, Zielinski formulated a law, still generally accepted today,
that Greek epic never presents two events as if they occurred
simultaneously. Rather than traversing the same temporal space
twice, archaic epic instead conceives of simultaneous actions con-
secutively, as if they occurred one after the other. By eliminating
the concept of “meanwhile” from the Homeric lexicon, Zielinski’s
theory refutes the possibility of epic time occupying transverse or
“horizontal” space (a conception of time that has since been
explored by scholars such as Benjamin 1968:261 and Anderson
1991:22-31). He based his findings on what he termed the eye’s
inability to apprehend multiple dimensions of time and space at
once: “So ist mein Sehn aus einem dreiplanigen plotzlich ein ein-
planiges geworden: die neu hinzugetretene Dimension der Zeit hat
die Raumdimension der Tiefe verdrangt” [Thus my vision suddenly
becomes one-dimensional from three: the newly-added dimension
of time has replaced the spatial dimension of depth] (Zielinski
1901:409).
Like Auerbach, Zielinski proposes that there is no “depth” to
time. This provides the basis for his larger claim that poetry, like aes-
thetics, cannot conceive of the simultaneous events of a plot in par-
allel space (Zielinski 1901:414). By focusing so exclusively on the
singularity of the present, Zielinski paved the way for other scholars
of his generation and after, such as Frankel (1968) and Page (1955),
who argued that in archaic epic, time had no three-dimensionality, or
158 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

sense of a proportionate whole, but was rather organized as a dis-

jointed amalgam of events which bore hardly any intrinsic relation to
each other (in the wake of early scholars like Zielinski and Auerbach,
see the important work of Austin 1966; Krischer 1971; Frazer 1981;
Whitman and Scodel 1981; Lynn-George 1988; Olson
1995:91-119).
Although critics of epic time pay little attention to
Hesiod, they do include him in their stipulations. Zielinski’s law,
for example, has been applied equally to the Theogony as it has to
the Iliad and Odyssey. The complexity of time zones in Hesiod’s
poem poses an interesting problem, however, for the Theogony—on
the level of narrative content at least—does combine two different
registers of time (mortal and immortal, or sequential and eternal)
simultaneously. As West's commentary notes, Hesiod breaks
Zielinski’s law on two occasions in the Theogony, and both of these
transgressions occur, crucially, at the point when Zeus is attempt-
ing to effect the transition from diachronic to synchronic time; that
is, at the beginning and end of his battle with the Titans, the deci-
sive conflict that establishes his rule for eternity (West 1966:617,
711; Frazer 1981).
In order to win the Titanomachy, Zeus must gain the assis-
tance of a group of ancient immortals known as the Hundred
Handers, who had long ago been imprisoned underground by their
father Ouranos:

‘OBpiapeco 8’ aos TPG Ta amp aduccato Bud

Kotte T dé Tuyn, dijce Kpatepdo évl Se0p0),
T}VOpEnv UTrEpoTrAOV aycopevos dé Kai Eldo¢
Kal weyeBos: KaTtEvacoe 8’ urd x8ovds Eevpuodeins.
Ev@’ of y' GAye’ ExovTes uTIO xPovl vateTaovTEs
Elat em coxaTit) wEyaAns ev Treipaoi yains
58a yar’ axvupevor, Kpadin yéya trev8os ExovrTes.
GAAG aogeas Kpovidns Te kal aBavator Geol GAAO1
OUs TEKEV NUKOLIOS ‘Pein Kpdovou ev piAdothTr
Pains ppadpoouvnow aviyyayov és pados autis:
 TOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 159

Wher their father (Ouranos) first grew angry at Obriareos,

Kottos and Gyges, he bound them in strong chains,
In awe of their overbearing strength and appearance
And size, and settled them under the wide-paved earth.
There under the earth they lived in grievance
Lurking at the furthermost limits on the edges of the great earth,
Sorely distressed, and harbouring great sorrow in their hearts.
But Zeus and the other immortal gods
Whom Rhea bore in partnership with Kronos
Brought them up into the light again under the advice of Gaia.
(Theogony 617—26)

At the same time as Zeus reaches under the earth to retrieve

the Hundred Handers, the Theogony’s narrative also steps back to an
earlier moment in time within the body of the story, to a point dur-
ing the rule of Ouranos (“when first . . .”), thus crossing the same
temporal space twice. There is a “meanwhile,” then, in Hesiod’s nar-
rative, but it is confined to the space of underground, where the
ancient gods wait until it is their time to reappear. In breach of
Zielinski’s law, the Theogony houses a different register of time under
the earth, which runs independently of the time upon its surface. At
line 626, these two temporal threads are reunited into a single narra-
tive plane, as the Hundred Handers are brought “into the light again”
from the “depths of the past,” and re-integrated with the present.
The space beneath the earth thereby serves as a kind of nar-
rative repository within which the plot “stores up” time for the
future, in much the same way as Hesiod, in the Works and Days, advis-
es his brother to store up and preserve the time of the present in
large jars that were sunk underground. Even Pandora, who other-
wise lets the contents of her jar escape, is able to at least store up
hope for future time inside her pithos.
Hesiod thus uses underground space to “archive” time, in
precisely the way that Auerbach and Zielinski sought to deny for epic
poetry. I borrow the analogy of the archive from a medieval scholar,
160 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Paul Strohm (2000), who in turn adapts it from Derrida’s Archive

Fever (1996). In Strohm’s words, “the archive does not arrest time,
but rather exists as an unstable amalgam of unexhausted past and
unaccomplished future” (80). In the immortal setting of Hesiod’s
Theogony, the past is always unexhausted. Since the gods cannot pass
out of existence, so too can the past never be brought to full comple-
tion. It can only be removed from the present by being contained or
put on hold for some moment in the future.
When Ouranos traps Gaia’s children within her subter-
ranean belly, therefore, he plays on the common analogy between
womb and jar in Greek thought ( Dean-Jones 1994:65) by utilizing
her belly as a storage space within which he hopes to hold back the
onset of the plot’s chronological sequence, just as his “binding” of the
Hundred Handers and imprisonment of them under the earth may
be understood, metaphorically, as a “binding” of narrative time
(Brooks 1984:101). Furthermore, Christopher Faraone (1992) has
shown how the techniques of both binding and burial were common-
ly practiced in apotropaic ritual precisely in order to avert or ward
off some future event. By binding an image of a god, or by sealing an
image or token within a pot and burying it, the actant sought to exert
his own control over time; to manipulate the approach of the future
or to temporarily arrest time within the present. “The Geoponica
(10.87.6) recommends attaching verse 5.387 of the Ares passage
(‘and three months and ten he lay chained in a bronze cauldron’) to
a tree to prevent it from prematurely casting its fruit—that is, it
‘binds’ the tree to hold on to its fruit until the correct moment in its
annual cycle” (Faraone 1992:286).
In Homer, Odysseus nearly transcends the long passage of
time which separates him from Ithaca, thanks to the temporary bind-
ing of the winds by Aeolus. In the Iliad, on the other hand, we are
told of how Ares once lay bound in strong chains for thirteen months
in a bronze jar, and almost perished as a result (5.384—91)—a testi-
mony to the considerable power that binding and entombment can
exert over even the immortals’ control over time.
 "TOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 161

As the Theogony moves forward to the “everlasting present”

of Zeus’ reign, therefore, it is also restrained by a narrative move-
ment which seeks to bind time within a space which—as the story
progresses—will come to symbolize the “depths of the past.” The
exit of the Hundred Handers from the dark regions underground
(Theogony 617—26) is thus a narratological move as well as a spatial
one, as the text retraces its steps into the archive of its past in order
to return certain key elements of the plot to the light of the present.
We have seen how Auerbach used binaries of light and dark-
ness to describe the difference between the present (visible, illumi-
nated, and surface) and the future or the past (dark, murky, and sub-
terranean). It is here that we can draw the clearest analogy between
his understanding of epic time and Hesiod’s temporal landscape. For
throughout the Theogony, the present is represented as that which is
visible, while the past and the future linger under the cover of dark-
ness or ground. The dark, subterranean cavern has long been used as
refuge or hide-out from chronological time. Epimenides, who—leg-
end has it—fell asleep in a cave, slipped out of time for a period of
57 years (Diels-Kranz fr.3, Dodds 1951:207—35). Similarly, Ouranos
attempts to indefinitely “hide” the future by forcing his offspring to
remain underground:

TWAVTAS ATOKPES PAOS OUK AvieoKE

Cains ev kevBuduvi

[[Ouranos] would not let them come up into the light, but hid them all
Within the passages of the earth.] (Theogony 157-58)

The Theogony, then, charts the development of time in three

dimensions, complete with pockets and dwellings within which the
past and the future can recede. When the infant Zeus is hidden with-
in a subterranean cave (Theogony 482—3) until he grows strong
enough to wrest power from his father, or when we are told that
Zeus’s thunderbolt had previously (tT tpiv) been hidden beneath the
earth (Theogony 505), as if being saved up for its crucial role at a later
162 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

point in the story, we come to understand that another level of tem-

porality exists below the surface of the ever-visible present of eter-
nal, immortal time.
In contrast to Auerbach’s formulation for the Odyssey, how-
ever, within which he stated that “Homeric style knows only a fore-
ground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present”
(7), in Hesiod the “depths of the past” cast a considerable shadow
over narrative movement, as if to suppress and all but overwhelm the
emergence of the present. Ouranos’s restraining of his children with-
in the belly of Gaia serves to indefinitely postpone the transition into
the future, just as Kronos’s own swallowing of his children attempts
to put a hold on the passage of time.
The Theogony is balanced by a pair of conflicting impulses:
the impulse to move forward in time, following the linear progres-
sion of language, genealogy, and history, and the impulse to suspend
time, to restrain it within a dilatory space which, instead of sending
time forward, pulls it back into the past. The poem has reckoned
with this tension from the very beginning, as it has been played out
in the plot’s movement from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, and
from diachronic to synchronic time (see Arthur 1982 for further
binary recasting). As Zeus attempts to close the gap between these
two poles, he is left with the need for a place where his own trou-
bling history, as manifested by the paradoxically ancient-but-ageless
Titans (1rpdtepoi Beoi, Theogony 424, 486), can be disposed of.
Hesiod solves the problem by creating a place within the
text where those temporalities may be contained. We have already
seen that Hesiod uses the space underground as a kind of archive, or
jar, within which he could store up narrative elements for the future.
In terms of the stratification of time in his poem, we have seen how
the earth provides Hesiod with a second layer of temporal space
which runs in parallel to the surface narrative, although often at a dif-
ferent rate. This is no less true for his description of Tartaros, a region
sunk deep beneath the earth with a geography and chronology of its
own. For Hesiod, Tartaros functions as that place in the text where
 "TOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 163

the narrative may resolve the complexities of its own transferal from
one perception of time to another and within which it may even con-
fine these complexities, in much the same way as Zeus uses it as a
space to restrain and confine the Titans.
Located as far underground as it takes for an anvil to fall for
nine days, Tartaros is encircled by an impenetrable wall of bronze,
three layers of darkness, and the backward-flowing streams of the
river Ocean. In keeping with its circular and static geography, Hesiod
describes Tartaros in language that cycles through a series of repeti-
tions which either follow too closely upon one another (Theogony
722—S) or, atypically for the poet (Sellschopp 1967), replay without
variation (736—9 = 807-10). Both narratologically and topographi-
cally, therefore, the underworld is a place without progress or devel-
opment through time. Instead, it is bound by the laws of stasis and
repetition. In some cases, as with the exchange of Night and Day
across its threshold (Theogony 748—54), that repetition validates the
cyclical, natural patterns of time in the world above. But for those
trapped within the walls of Tartaros, there is explicitly no exit, no
“place” for time to go (Theogony 732, 772). The Underworld is thus,
in both cases, the site of repetition, but repetition without variation
(Pucci 1997), without the movement forward or out which is a nec-
essary prerequisite for all successful story-telling (Todorov
1977:233; Brooks 1984:90ff). In this way, the underworld draws
together the “archive” of the space underground, where time is held
back, with the dreadful state of repetition found at the edges of the
earth, the place where Prometheus’s liver, for example, is endlessly
replicated. In each case, these extreme locales serve to trap or hide
time at the edges of the narrative (Johnson 1999: 12-13).
In terms of the geography of plot, Tartaros thus serves as
the site to which all dead ends lead—within which the machinery of
various unfulfilled (but ever-present) story-lines winds down and is
abandoned. Although Zeus cannot destroy his immortal forebears, he
can stop their succession through narrative. By placing them within
the sequestered space of Tartaros he creates a topographical equiva-
164 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

lent of the “depths of the past” to which their mythic identity will
always be bound.
As already observed, Zeus’s actions in this case are similar
to those of the Titans before him, who sought to fix the present in
their own time by breaking the cycle of filial succession. Ouranos’s
entrapment of his children within Gaia’s womb, like Kronos’s
entrapment of his children within his own belly, is analogous to
Zeus’s suppression of those who pose a threat to the permanence of
his sovereignty and imprisonment of them within the belly of the
Underworld. For, in order to reach Tartaros, one must first. pass
through a great chasm (740) which West (1966) links with the god
Chaos, and suggests may be envisioned as a throat (116). That throat
looks back to the throat of Kronos, and forward to Zeus’s own swal-
lowing of Metis later in the poem. It also opens up a space in the nar-
rative which both West (1997:297) and Walcot (1961, 1966:61),
drawing on Near Eastern parallels, have compared to a large metal
jar.
By fashioning Tartaros as a kind of vast, makeshift jar that—
unlike the jars of the Works and Days—will never be opened, Zeus
definitively separates off the categories of the past and future from
his own all-encompassing present. In the present analysis of the jar in
the Works and Days, we saw how it worked as a kind of archive with-
in which the past could be stored for the future. But the principal
function of the archive is of course its role in preserving memory, of
saving time from the disintegration of the past. In the immortal
world of the Theogony, however, the underground storage space
becomes a refuge, a means of artificially creating a past in a syn-
chronic universe. For, if mortals use forgetfulness and hope to cate-
gorize that which is past and that which remains to take place in the
future, then the Olympians—who can instantly see through both of
these devices—are left with the problem of having nowhere to “put”
their past or at least of setting it out of sight. In this sense Tartaros
functions as an archive which binds a previous but ever-present gen-
eration of gods in an eternal state of stasis and repetition, as if
 TTOPOGRAPHIES OF TIME IN HESIOD 165

“frozen” in an earlier age. More importantly, and also paradoxically,

Tartaros functions as a kind of “oubliette,” a secret underground dun-
geon, which (as its etymology suggests) substitutes for the human
process of forgetting.
Jean-Pierre Vernant has described Hesiodic time as not a
single, linear structure but as a “stratification of layers” (1983:36).
We have attempted to expand on that metaphor here by thinking of
time in the Theogony in terms of a topography, where the temporal
discrepancies of the poem are externalized into spatial components.
Rather than adhere to the concept forwarded by Zielinski and
Auerbach, among others, that Greek epic narrative plays itself out in
only two dimensions, the Theogony offers us a glimpse of a subter-
ranean time that, despite Zeus’s machinations, never entirely disap-
pears beneath the surface of Hesiod’s world.

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 ee@S8@e

~ GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC
TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST
OLYMPIC GAMES

Astrid Moller

T= first Olympic Games are commonly believed to have

occurred in the year 776 BCE. With this date, many have
held, history begins in Greece, even in Europe. Some schol-
ars, however, have cast doubt on the accuracy of this date, and it is
no longer easy to believe that we actually have a fixed date in Greece
from the 8th century BCE. During this time, the Greeks only start-
ed to write and had not yet created documents which would prove
such a date. Considering the sanctuary at Olympia, the archaeologi-
cal evidence suggests that the games began in the 7th century.
Around 700 BCE, the area of the sanctuary was leveled, and shortly
after this time wells were increasingly sunk into the ground, presum-
ably to cater to the growing needs of athletes and visitors. Not until
the 6th century do we find actual remains of a stadium (Mallwitz
1988, 1999; Sinn 1996).
Although our available material evidence actually argues
against the traditional dating of the first Olympic Games to 776
BCE, this chronographical problem serves as an excellent example of
the processes by which ancient Greek chronographers arrived at
170 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

these dates in the first place, and it demonstrates clearly how deeply
implicated ancient chronography was in various contemporary cul-
tural and discursive traditions. It is perhaps somewhat ironic, there-
fore, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, that we have every
reason to doubt the authenticity of the traditional foundation date of
the Olympic Games, but little chance that we could ever find a bet-
ter date which would be as precise.
Ancient chronography has two meanings in the context of
classical historiography. On the one hand, it is a historiographical
genre. Felix Jacoby (1909:88) held that it began with Hellanicus of
Lesbos at the end of the 5th century BCE. During the Hellenistic
Period it took the shape of chronological tables, even though we do
not know when synchronistic tables actually started. It might have
been with Castor of Rhodes in the 1st century BCE, although there
is no direct evidence, or with Eusebius in the 4th century CE, whose
chronicle was evidently organized in parallel columns. David Asheri
(1991/92:54) argued for Timaeus of Tauromenium, who lived some-
where between 350 and 250 BCE, as the inventor of synchronistic
tables. Chronography thus describes a record of historical events
precisely dated by reference to an absolute chronological system. On
the other hand, the term “chronography” is used to refer to the
process in which precise dates were established for persons and
events not yet included in an absolute chronology (Mosshammer
1979:85). This is the situation at the beginning of historiography in
the 5th century BCE, when Greek historians started to establish
ways to date events.
In a world without documents that already contain events
dated by years of kings, magistrates, or other systems, historians had
to find ways to date events. Ancient Greek scholars created a net-
work of dates by drawing diachronic and synchronic lines, compos-
ing a temporal co-ordinate system similar to the spatial one used for
geographical maps. In 1966, the Italian historian Santo Mazzarino
argued against the schematic attribution of cyclical time perception
to the Greeks and linear time perception to Judaeo-Christian
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES 171

thought (1966, 2.2: 412-61, n. 555). He held that the typical way to
set up a chronology in classical historiography was what he called the
diastematic system of dating.
The Greek word diastema means “interval,” “difference,” or
“extension,” “dimension”; diastematikos means proceeding in inter-
vals, indicating distance or having dimension. According to
Mazzarino, the backbone of classical chronology is made up by time
intervals between more or less important events. In Greek chronol-
ogy, each event had to be located in time in relation to other events
which was expressed by intervals in years or generations and in syn-
chronisms between them. Consequently, a network of synchronic
and diachronic coordinate axes was created (Daffina 1987). A major
hindrance to chronology arose from the lack of a fixed point of ref-
erence, such as for example, the birth of Christ in Western civiliza-
tion, from which point events are counted forward and backward (It
was Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century who fixed Christ’s birth to
525 years before his own time. The calculation ante Christum natum,
however, was only introduced by Dionysius Petavius who published his
Opus de Doctrina Temporum in 1627). Instead, the Greeks had to build
their chronology from within to locate each event at a certain dis-
tance to and from another.
Synchronic lines had to be found by creating synchronisms
between persons, the foundation of cities, or famous battles. The
ability to establish that two events occurred at the same time not only
coordinated events but also provided the possibility of connecting
two different dating systems which might have been current in two
different cities.
Diachronic devices were provided to a certain extent by
genealogies (see Moller 1996 for reservations) and by lists of epony-
mous magistrates, priestesses or victors. Genealogies naturally give
only rough generations, and matters are made even more confusing
by the fact that ancient authors often have different notions of what
constitutes a “generation length” (Meyer 1892—99:151-88; Pearson
1942:9-12; Prakken 1943; den Boer 1954:5—29; van Compernolle
172 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

1959; Miller 1955, 1965, 1970, 1971). What is more, Greek

genealogies mostly deal with mythical figures who are only very
rarely explicitly connected to the historical present (Thomas 1989;
Henige 1974). The lists of historical figures were not treated much
differently. Genealogies could be transformed into king lists and vice
versa, according to necessity. The manipulation of genealogies or lists
became more urgent when synchronization of persons was required.
We should not believe that this is a phenomenon occurring in oral
societies. The concept of synchronizing generations itself requires
written methods and probably a written mode of study.
Lists of eponymous magistrates are, however, more prom-
ising for accurate dating in giving an annual pattern for counting sin-
gle years. Unfortunately, we do not have any evidence of such lists
before 435-415 BCE, when the first archon-list was inscribed at
Athens (see now Hedrick 2002). Likewise, it is important to empha-
size that the later epigraphical lists we find from the Hellenistic peri-
od into Roman times had no significance in historiography, not even
in local history as far as we can tell. Besides, they do not provide
more information than the sequence of office-holders with an occa-
sional comment. This is far from what we expect of a chronicle and
does not give us the documents needed to date events. Not until a
chronographer puts a name from a list and an event together can we
consider a historical event to be dated.
Chronicles were uncommon in Greece, since the Greeks
tended to prefer a narrative or literary history to the dry listing of
annual magistrates and events, with the Marmor Parium seeming
to be one of the very few exceptions. There is some evidence for an
annalistic pattern in historiographical literature, but it followed far
more the narrative conditions of Greek historiography than what
we would find, for example, in Near Eastern or medieval chroni-
cles. It seems that scholars writing local histories—if they used an
annalistic pattern at all—did not find the material in archives, but
had first to draw up a list of local kings, magistrates, or priests
(Moller 2001).
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES 173

Thus, early Greek chronography is not just a construction

based on generation reckoning by means of genealogies, or the sim-
ple counting of annual magistrates, but a far more complex and com-
prehensive tradition (Mosshammer 1979:101-105). Apparently
there is no abstract model of chronographic theory; it is the individ-
ual tradition which determines each date. In the words of Alden
Mosshammer, “early Greek chronology is not a problem to be
‘solved, but a tradition to be understood and respected” (1979:86).
In this sense, it is not helpful to simply change, knock down, or over-
turn ancient dates even if they seem entirely bogus. It is necessary,
rather, to look for the processes by which they were created and
passed on.
Much of Greek chronology since the 3rd century BCE is
based on counting Olympiads. The Olympic games took place every
fourth year, and the interval was counted as first, second, third,
fourth year of Olympiad X. The list of the Olympic victors, which is
the basis of this calculation, is said to have been edited by Hippias of
Elis at the end of the 5th century BCE or perhaps a little later.
Scholars have discussed Hippias’ sources for more than a hundred
years now and the question is still not settled. On the whole, one can
distinguish between optimists who believe that Hippias found an offi-
cial list in the temple archive at Olympia which he then published
(Asheri 1991/92:53; Bengtson 1971:21; Finley and Pleket
1976:12), and pessimists or skeptics who declare Hippias to be a liar
and forger who invented the names at least before the 6th century
BCE (Mahaffy 1881; Korte 1904; Beloch 1929; Peiser 1990. Bilik
1996, 2000 for bibliography).
All arguments are built on poor evidence. To state it clear-
ly: Of Hippias’s anagraphé not a single fragment survived. Everything
we try to establish about this work is therefore purely conjectural.
The only testimony is given by Plutarch, who declared in Numa 1.6
that the list of the Olympic victors is said to have been published late
by Hippias without a trustworthy basis for this work. Plutarch’s neg-
ative assessment of Hippias’s work is easier to understand in its con-
174 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

text within his vita of Numa: It was most likely prompted by

Plutarch’s annoyance at the difficulties of dating Numa (Bultrighini
1990:206-7).
Neither Hippias’s sources nor the shape of his work with
the title Olympionikon anagraphé can be reconstructed. Other lost
works with similar titles like Olympionikai or Olympiades are equally
difficult to restore and do not provide much help. Felix Jacoby
(FGrHist Ib comm. 223; 1949, 59. 281-82 n. 51) thought that this
kind of work started with a historical introduction which gave the
stories about the foundation of the games. Perhaps it also provided
the further history of the games as more and more contests were
added. The main part, the list of the Olympic victors, consisted,
according to Jacoby, only of the blank names of victors in the diverse
competitions.
Hippias’s Olympionikon anagraphé was probably written as a
literary work. It seems therefore possible that its character was more
literary than what we would find in a mere listing of plain names.
Plato’s Socrates, however, teases Hippias about his learning in histor-
ical affairs. Socrates remarks that Hippias must be lucky not being
asked by the Lacedaemonians to recite the Athenian archons since
Solon. Thus provoked, Hippias boasts that he would memorize 50
names having heard them once (Hippias Maj. 285d—e). This might be
an indication that he perhaps was famous for his long list of names.
On the other hand, it does not necessarily indicate that he was capa-
ble of actually generating long lists of names on his own to mark his
putative erudition. Especially if he constructed, and did not deliber-
ately invent, the names of Olympic victors from material such as oral
tradition, legendary myths and dedicatory inscriptions, he might
have preferred to give the whole story and not only a list of names.
We might therefore imagine his work to have originally had a far
more narrative character, even though a long history of excerpting
has left us with no more than the names.
Not having a single fragment of Hippias’s list, it is in fact
only Eusebius in the 4th century CE who provides us with the most
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS-ABOUT THE FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES 175

comprehensive ancient list of Olympic victors. It is found in the first

book of his Chronicle, where he presents the collected chronograph-
ical material he then used to build his canons, the famous synchro-
nistic tables. This list ends with the 249th Olympiad or the year 217
CE. This is one of the arguments for regarding the lost chronographiai
of Sextus Julius Africanus, the first Christian chronography from the
3rd century CE, as Eusebius’s source for the Olympic victors. The
supposition that Eusebius found this list in Africanus’s chronographiai
has been challenged by Mosshammer. Africanus did not use the cal-
culation by Olympiads himself and it is a little surprising that
Eusebius, who heavily criticized Africanus, should have trusted his
chronographical knowledge (Mosshammer 1979:138-—66). If
Mosshammer's arguments against Africanus’ authorship of the list of
Olympic victors in Eusebius are valid, Rutgers’s 1862 edition of
Africanus’s Olympiadon anagraphé might well turn out to be a philol-
ogist’s fiction.
Besides Eusebius’s list, parts of the Olympic victor list are
preserved in a papyrus from the 3rd century CE (POxy II 222 =
FGrHist 415), in fragments of Phlegon of Tralles (FGrHist 257), a
libertus of Hadrian, and a papyrus from c. 30 BCE (POxy I 12 =
FGrHist 255). The rest are literary testimonies about works with
titles like Olympionikon anagraphé, Olympionikai, or Olympiades even by
famous scholars like Aristotle, Timaeus, and Eratosthenes, of which
little or nothing has survived.
Due to the poor, fragmentary state of most Greek histori-
ography outside of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, it
is not easy to determine when the chronographical use of Olympic vic-
tors began. Polybius wrote that around 300 BCE, Timaeus established
synchronisms between the ephors and kings of Sparta, the archons at
Athens, the priestesses at Argos, and the Olympic victors (FGrHist 566
T10 ap. Pol. 12.11). There are fragments of Timaeus showing that he
dated events in years before the first Olympic games (such as the syn-
chronized foundations of Rome and Carthage 38 years before the first
Olympiad: Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.74.1 =Timaeus FGrHist 566 F60).
176 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

This means, of course, that he would have had an idea when to start
counting Olympic victors and that he made attempts to synchronize the
first Olympic games with other events. Perhaps he started counting
Olympiads by numbers, too. The use of ordinal numbers for Olympiads
is, however, attested for the first time in an inscription from the first
half of the 3rd century BCE, the so-called Olympiad chronicle from
Athens (IG II/IlI2 2326) (Ebert 1982).
Many modern scholars assume that it was Hippias of Elis who
dated the foundation of the Olympic games to a year which we trans-
late as 776 BCE. The discussion about the authenticity of the Olympic
victor list is thus essentially connected with the discussion about the
foundation date. One line of argument derives from the idea that
Hippias found a documentary list starting around 580 BCE (Ol. 50)
when some consider that Elis finally took over the sanctuary at
Olympia (cf. Moller 2003), and that he therefore had to reconstruct
the victors for the earlier games. How did he know where to start?
Mahaffy (1881) thought that Hippias determined the founda-
tion date by Iphitus, the mythical founder of the games, and that the
earlier parts of the list, i.e. before the 50th Olympiad, were construct-
ed accordingly. Cavaignac (1913—20:336-9) believed that Hippias had
found 40—50 names for the time prior to 580 BCE when the docu-
mentary list started. He assumed that till 612 BCE the games were
hold annually and calculated that the Olympic games started around
650 BCE. His clearly arbitrary arguments found immediate response
(Wade-Gery 1925:762-64). Wilamowitz (1922:481-90) equally
doubted the penteteric character of the games right from the begin-
ning and distinguished between the list which he considered authentic
and the chronology based on this list. He could therefore claim that the
date of 776 BCE was much too high (but see also Jacoby, FGrHist IIIb
comm. 152 n. 47 for criticism). These arguments were followed up by
Lenschau (1936, 1938:224-27) who took the year 580 BCE as the
beginning of penteteric games and assumed that Hippias had found 49
names of victors in the stadium race which prompted him to calculate
(49x4) + 580 = 776 = OL. 1.
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FirRST OLYMPIC GAMES 177

That Hippias calculated with these numbers is quite out of

the question. How could he have known to add 49x4 to 580 years
before the birth of Christ or the beginning of the common era and
that the first Olympic games took place accordingly 776 years before
the common era started? If Hippias calculated the first Olympic
games at all, he could only either synchronize them with another
event or estimate an interval between him or another dated event in
the past and the first victor. Brouwers (1952) supposed that the
Olympic games of 476 were the starting point for the estimation of
an interval of 300 years till the first games. This interval, he held, was
calculated by means of a Spartan genealogy which had nine genera-
tions between Lycurgus who, as was generally believed, helped
Iphitus to establish the games and Archidamos who became king in
476 BCE. Both were synchronized by Aristotle’s claim to have seen
the discus of Iphitus at Olympia (Plut. Lyc. 1.2; cf. Paus. 5.20.1).
Lycurgus was made soon responsible for co-founding the games
(Hieronymus of Rhodes F33 Wehrli ap. Athen. 14.635F).
This argument has some flaws, as normally the Spartan king
list was calculated in generations of 40 years, thus not adding up nine
generations to 300 years, and there is no evidence for a genealogy
having these nine generations before Apollodorus synchronized
Lycurgus with the Spartan king Alkamenes (FGrHist 244 F7a—c). The
supposed intrinsic connection between Hippias’s construction and
the date of the first Olympic games is further exploited by Peiser
(1990), who believes that the date of 776 BCE is the crime of
Hippias, although he acknowledges the impact of later chronography
in lengthening the Olympic chronology.
If we remember that there is not a single fragment of
Hippias’s Olympionikon anagraphé left to us, it is rather perplexing that
so many arguments about the date of the first Olympic games start
from the assumption that Hippias could be made responsible for dat-
ing the first games. He probably started his list with Koroibos, the
famous first victor of the stadium race who enjoyed hero worship
and whose grave was known at the Elian border (Paus. 8.26.3f.), but
178 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

whether Hippias actually tried to synchronize him with another

famous figure is open to discussion. He should have had at least some
ideas about a relative chronology of the first games, such as after the
return of the Heraclids and long before the synoikism of Elis.
Very likely it was Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the second half
of the 3rd century BCE who fixed the beginning of the Olympic
games so as to allow us to translate it to the 776th year before
Christ’s birth or the common era (Bickerman 1980:75-6). Timaeus’s
Olympiad dating, however, remains too fragmentary to enable us to
get a clear idea about his temporal grid, and to allow us to know
where exactly he placed the first Olympics.We hear that Timaeus put
the Trojan War 417 years before the first Olympiad, whereas
Eratosthenes calculated 407 years (Censorinus, De die natali 21.2;
Timaeus FGrHist F125; Eratosthenes FGrHist Flc) which makes it
likely that they had different estimates either for the fall of Troy or
the first Olympiad. We are in fact as ignorant as Dionysius of
Halicarnassus about Timaeus’s kanones (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.74.1;
cf. Jacoby, FGrHist 566 comm. 538 with n. 97, on Timaeus’s and
Eratosthenes’s dating by Olympiads), whereas Eratosthenes’s kanones
proved remarkably influential. Eratosthenes’s fragment 1a, however,
provides us with a periodization of Greek history from the fall of
Troy down to Alexander’s death in 323 BCE.

Eratosthenes [FGrHist 241:Fla] defines the ages as follows:

From the fall of Troy until the return of the Heraclids ....... 80 years
From these until the settlement of Ionia ................ 60 years
The time thereafter until Lycurgus’ guardianship .......... 159 years
Until the year preceding the first Olympiad ............. 108 years
From this Olympiad until the invasion of Xerxes .......... 297 years
From this until the beginning of the Peloponnesian war ...... 48 years
And until the end of the war and the defeat of the Athenians. . 27 years
And until the battle of Leuktra ....0....0.....0.0..000.. 34 years
After this until Philip’s death ....................00... 35 years
Thereafter until the passing away of Alexander ............ 12 years
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES 179

Eratosthenes gives the intervals in years between each

event which enable us to calculate from otherwise established
absolute dates such as the death of Alexander that Eratosthenes
fixed the first Olympic games to a year equivalent to our 776/75
BCE.
How did he calculate this date? To answer this question, it
is necessary to take a look at the foundation myth of the Olympic
games. Ancient Greeks hold that it was Iphitus who founded the
games at Olympia. Unfortunately, this Iphitus did not belong to a
proper genealogy, and was thus difficult to date. Only when
Aristotle saw the so-called discus of Iphitus at Olympia which
bore a text about the institution of the sacred truce and was
inscribed with Lycurgus’s name, it became possible to synchronize
Iphitus with Lycurgus (Plut. Lyc. 1.3). Quite apart from the fact
that the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus changed his position in Greek
chronology as he was connected with different kings of the
Spartan king list, the synchronism seems to have caused some dif-
ficulties with already established dates. Eratosthenes and
Apollodorus both maintained that Lycurgus lived a long time
before the first Olympiad. Thus, the synchronization of Lycurgus
with the foundation of the Olympic games and the statement that
he lived long before this event caused a huge gap. Timaeus’s solu-
tion to this was to assume the existence of two men under the
name Lycurgus. This idea is still followed when scholars argue that
it was not the Spartan lawgiver, but a homonymous hero who
instituted the Olympic truce together with Iphitus (Wilamowitz
1884:284; Jacoby, FGrHist 257 comm. 839).
If one wanted to keep the synchronism and at the same
time leave Lycurgus where he was placed by the Spartan king list,
one had to cover this gap. A solution was found by inserting the so-
called uncounted Olympiads. In Eusebius, we hear of 27 uncount-
ed Olympiads that were not written down in the official lists
before the Eleans, the owners of the sanctuary at Olympia and
organizers of the festival, started to record each winner of each
180 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

contest (Eusebius Chron. I 90 Karst). The invention of several

uncounted Olympiads helped to keep the synchronism between
Lycurgus and Iphitus straight. (The alternative 13 uncounted
Olympiads are ascribed to Callimachus who might have had a
smaller gap to cover). Weniger (1920/21:44) suggests that he
counted eight years for one Olympiad. It seems that Iphitus’s
foundation of the games was divided from their first victor which
enabled the chronographers to keep Iphitus synchronized with
Lycurgus. The actual list could then start with the first known and
recorded champion. That Iphitus must have reached an age close to
Methuselah apparently did not matter.
Back to Eratosthenes, one may see that he put Lycurgus
at a distance of 108 years until the year preceding the first
Olympiad; 108 divided by 4 makes 27. This should be the same
distance of 27 uncounted Olympiads as in Eusebius’s much later
note. The synchronism between Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver,
and Iphitus, the founding father of the Olympic games, which
became possible after Aristotle had discovered the discus of Iphitus
at Olympia, not only enabled Eratosthenes to connect the Spartan
king list with the Olympiad era, but also allowed him to assign
Lycurgus an authoritative date which reconciled diverging tradi-
tions of the Spartan king list and the new Olympiad era
(Mosshammer 1979:174—80; cf. den Boer 1954:4—29 for alterna-
tive calculations).
It is not especially productive merely to question the date
776 BCE by simply declaring Hippias a liar and inventor of the list
of Olympic victors. As we have seen, Hippias himself seems likely
not to have had much invested in fixing a foundation date for the
games. Rather, it was the later chronographers who seem to have
used Hippias’ Olympionikon anagraphe in their efforts to turn the
first games into the beginning of an era which would give them a
fixed position in the temporal coordinate system of Greek
chronography.
GREEK CHRONOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE FIRST OLYMPIC GAMES 181

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 oe@7@e

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS

OF THE WEEK IN THE 4TH
CENTURY CE WESTERN
ROMAN EMPIRE
Michele Renee Salzman

lmost anywhere we travel in the world today, we can count

A= living by the seven-day week. This was not always so. In
the only extant 4th century Roman calendar to survive, the
Codex Calendar of 354, there were no fewer than three “weekly
cycles,” one of eight-days, to record the traditional Roman market
week, one of seven-days to record the planetary week, and one of 10
days to record the lunar cycle. The conjunction of no fewer than
three different weekly cycles in a calendar filled with pagan holidays
and intended for use by a Christian in the city of Rome in 354 raises
some obvious questions, not the least of which is to wonder how
prevalent was the notion of the seven-day week in the 4th century.
This question becomes more intriguing since most scholars
see the 4th century CE as the time when the seven-day week, culmi-
nating with a day off on Sunday, became the accepted way of organ-
izing and minding time. Scholars point to a famous law of March 3,
321 (Theodosian Code 2.8.1), in which Constantine made the dies
Solis—the day of the Sun or Sunday as we call it—a holiday; many
scholars see this law as a response to the Christian view of Sunday,
186 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

and especially the view of the Church of Rome that had been intent
on implementing a seven-day weekly cycle anchored on Sunday as a
day of worship and/or rest (Bacchiocchi 1977; Zerubavel 1985;
Rordorf 1968; Cotton 1933; Beckwith and Stott 1978).
Some scholars have wondered if Constantine, brilliant
politician that he was, was not playing both sides of the fence, choos-
ing to recognize a day—dies Solis—that was also significant for pagan
worshipers, especially those of Sol Invinctus and Mithras, of which
there were many more than Christians at the time that Constantine
passed his law (Bohmer 1931; Zockler 1912; Rordorf 1968;
Bacchiocchi 1977; Cameron and Hall 1999; de Giovanni 1977).
However we interpret Constantine’s intentions behind his Sunday
law, his actions have led Charles Pietri (1984) and others to argue
that it was the 4th century Christians who largely developed and
promulgated our modern notion of the seven-day week with its focus
on Sunday as a day of rest and worship.
But, given the evidence of the Codex Calendar of 354, with
its seven-day week illustrated by pagan astrological signs for a
Christian to use—one cannot help but wonder if the notion of the
seven-day week anchored on Sunday as promulgated by 4th century
Christian leaders and emperors was distinctly different from the
notion of the week held by pagans in the Western Roman empire.
And further, how did the imperial and Christian emphasis on and
view of Sunday contribute to developing the seven-day week in the
4th century Western Roman empire? And finally, given the multiple
weekly cycles in the Codex Calendar of 354 did the seven-day week
replace other ways of dating and organizing people’s time in the 4th
century? If not, when did the seven-day week take on these functions
in the west?
These three concerns are of more than mere antiquarian
interest, for they highlight, among other issues, the ways in which
Christians used time to shape their group identity. Indeed, some
scholars have argued that Christian leaders focused on Sunday and
the seven-day week to establish a unique identity over and against not
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 187

only Jews, who celebrated the Sabbath, but also pagans (Goldenberg
1979:442-45; Stern 2000:106-107; Zerubavel 1985:22). If, howev-
er, the seven-day week and the religious and ritual import of Sunday
were already predominant among pagans, Christian leaders do not so
much appear to be establishing a separate identity as maintaining
continuities with their pagan contemporaries. At issue is the question
of the dynamics of group formation and the conversion techniques
adopted by the post-Constantinian church.
This chapter argues three main points. First, pagan and
Christian notions of the week in the 4th century were very similar,
and, in this fluid world, pagans and Christians influenced one anoth-
er in their use of time as an organizing principle of social life, leaving
a legacy that has shaped our contemporary notions of temporality.
Second, the recognition of Sunday as a day not only of worship but
of rest was a Constantinian innovation which shows Christian influ-
ence but had no clear pagan precedents; this helps to explain why this
notion of Sunday only gradually shaped 4th century notions of the
day for pagans and Christians alike. And third, the notion of the
seven-day week with its focus on Sunday cannot be securely docu-
mented as replacing other ways of dating or organizing time in the
4th century. Rather, dating by lunar days as well as market days and
by Kalends, Nones, and Ides continued throughout this century and
well into the next. In other words, it took more than a week, indeed,
more than a century, for the effects of Constantine’s law and the
Christian notion of Sunday as the anchor to the seven-day week to
uniformly replace other ways of minding time.

The Seven-day Week: Background

We shall look briefly at the origins of the seven-day week in the

Roman Empire in the centuries before Constantine. As Eviatar
Zerubavel pointed out in his insightful study, The Seven-Day Circle
(1985), the seven-day week is not a natural cycle. So, “from an his-
188 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

torical standpoint, there are two ways of explaining why the week to
which we adhere is seven-days long, neither of which necessarily
excludes the other. One explanation relates the length of our week
to the seven-days of Creation in traditional Jewish cosmology” (6).
The biblical account of Creation explains God’s commandment to
work for six days and then rest periodically on the seventh day, which
for the Jews was the Sabbath. This divine temporal plan requires no
further explanation for a believer.
The second way to explain the seven-day cycle relates to the
seven planets of ancient astrology: “It is generally believed that the
linking of the planets to the seven gods of each day was a Babylonian,
or Chaldaean contribution, evolving around 500 BCE in conjunction
with astrological needs to cast horoscopes” (14). This linkage may go
back to earlier Babylonian beliefs in a universe that was a “sevenfold
entity governed by a fusion of seven deities” (7). It is not until the
Hellenistic Age that we see evidence for a seven-day astrological
week, evolving probably around the 2nd century BCE in Alexandria
(Maas 1902:267; Neugebauer 1963:168—69; Boll 1912).
This astrological origin, along with the Egyptian worship of
the Sun, may explain why the 2nd century CE Roman historian Dio
Cassius (37.18—19) thought that the Egyptians originated the seven-
day planetary week that spread in the Roman Empire in the 1st cen-
tury BCE. The earliest Roman reference to the gods of the week
comes from the Ist century BCE poet Tibullus, who claims to have
used as a pretext for lingering with his lover, the “sacred day of
Saturn” (1.3.18).
From this point on, the names of the planetary days of the
week can be found in a variety of Roman writers. Often, as in the
Satires of Juvenal, these references are tied to astrological predic-
tions, or to the Sabbath observance of the Jews (Sat. 7.160; 14.96 ff.
see Meinhold 1909; Boll 1912:2573—74). We hear of teachers of
rhetoric giving their lessons on a seven-day weekly basis, be it
Fridays in Juvenal’s Rome (Sat. 7.160) or Saturdays in Suetonius’s
Rhodes (Tiberius 32.4). By the 2nd century, Dio Cassius can claim
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 189

that the seven-day planetary week is becoming quite habitual to all

the rest of mankind and to the Romans themselves: “The custom of
referring the days to the seven stars called planets was instituted by
the Egyptians. . . But since it is now quite the fashion with mankind
generally and even with the Romans themselves, and is to them
already in a way an ancestral tradition, I wish to write briefly of it”
(37.18.1—2).
Such familiarity was based on more than mere speech
habits; by the 1st century CE, we see clear evidence that the Romans
were using the seven-day planetary week to keep track of their dates;
three of 43 calendars extant from the 1st century CE published by
Atillio Degrassi (1963:326) included the letters A—G for the days of
the seven-day planetary week alongside the letters A—H for the eight-
day market week.
A utilitarian function is indicated too, in the more abbrevi-
ated calendars that have come down to us, known as parapegmata. An
example of one, from a wall adjacent to the Baths of Trajan in Rome,
was preserved even after that building became a small Christian sanc-
tuary to Saint Felicity; in it the days of the week are indicated by the
planets, whose seven busts are depicted at the top above a zodiac cir-
cle. The zodiac circle was used to show the 12 months of the year.
To the left and right are the days of the lunar month (see Figure 9.1).
A bone peg found with this parapegma allowed the user to indicate
the weekly and monthly cycle. In several of these abbreviated calen-
dars, the seven-day week is accompanied by the eight-day market
cycle recorded by the name of the town (Degrassi 1963:299-307;
Salzman 1990:8-10).
That people referred to events in their own lives using the
planetary names is shown by inscriptions from private monuments.
In Hermann Dessau’s 1892—1916 collection Inscriptiones Latinae
Selectae (hereafter cited as ILS) of almost 10,000 Latin inscriptions,
some nine monuments date events using the planetary named days.
Some of these are funerary monuments giving the date of death in
this manner, perhaps because the day of death was thought to have
190 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

been determined by the movement of the planets. Yet, even in these,

the date of death is also recorded according to the conventional sys-
tem of Kalends, Nones, and Ides. So, for example, the pagan from
Rome, Blastio, notes his birthday on the Kalends of September, on
the sixth hour of the Day of the Moon, or Monday, and his death
date, three days before the ides of June, in the first hour of the day
of Saturn, our Saturday (Dessau ILS:8528).
The association of the days of the week with astrological
and cosmic ties is also noteworthy within the context of the cult of
Mithras; a Mithras worshiper in 202 claimed that he was “born at
dawn in the consulship of the two Augusti, Severus and Antoninus,
twelve days before the Kalends of December [i.e., 20 November,
202}, on the day of Saturn, on the eighteenth day of the moon,” as
Vermaseren notes in his Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum
Religionis Mithrae (1956:no. 498; hereafter cited as CIMRM; see also
Vermaseren and van Essen 1965). Some scholars have interpreted
this to refer to his rebirth through some sort of Mithraic initiation
(Clauss 2000:104-105; Guarducci 1979). But what is noteworthy is
the use of three dating conventions, Kalends, Nones, and Ides, the
planetary week, and the lunar cycle, as well as the standard dating by
consular year.
The widespread interest in astrology certainly contributed
to the growing familiarity with the seven-day planetary week, judged
by the frequency with which we find references to these in texts and
calendars from the Roman Empire in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. But
some scholars, like Paul Marie Duval (1953), have argued that it was
also the popular pagan cults of Mithras and Sol that, in this period,
help explain the growing importance of the seven-day planetary
week. Robert Turcan has maintained that the week had liturgical
import for Mithraists, based in part on the symbolic ladder of the
planets which, according to Celsus (Origen, Contra Celsum 6.22) was
shown to initiates and represented a week going backward, starting
from the day of Saturn (Saturday) and ending with the day of Sol
(Sunday) (Turcan 1993:100). A Mithraic relief from Bologna also
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192 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

shows the gods of the week, but beginning with Sol (from right to
left) (Vermaseren CIMRM:693). Turcan explains the placement of Sol
in the Bologna relief as being tied to notions of Mithras as the god of
Time and to Pythagorean influences on the developing Mithraic cult;
according to Turcan (but with no supporting evidence), the
Pythagoreans consecrated the seventh day to Apollo, that is Sol, and
this, in conjunction with the close association of Sol Invictus with
Mithras explains the sequence of the planets beginning with Sol, not
Saturn, in the Bologna relief. Yet another reason for this placement
may be the practices of astrologers; the 2nd century astrologer
Vettius Valens, in his Anthologiarum 1.10 (Kroll 1908: 26), reckoned
birth dates using a seven-day week beginning with Sol, not Saturn.
The evidence that can be adduced for the Mithraists’ use of
the seven-day planetary week is largely iconographic; we simply do
not know how much it shaped their liturgy in the centuries before
Constantine. So, while it seems logical that Mithraists should incor-
porate the seven-day week given its planetary base and, the icono-
graphic remains from Mithraea, there is no firm evidence, as far as
we can know, that they actually did so. This is also true for the cult of
Sol Invictus, which was, as noted above, so closely linked with that
of Mithras in the popular mind that people made vows to Sol Invictus
Mithras (Vermaseren CIMRM:360—62; see Halsberghe 1972). The
most we can say is that some pagans, as well as some Christians in the
second and third centuries, used the seven-day weekly cycle to date
moments in their private lives, but they did so in conjunction with
other dating conventions.

Pagan and Christian Notions of the Seven-

day Week in the 4th Century

The Roman habit of using multiple dating conventions continued

into the 4th century, despite the noticeably heightened level of rhet-
oric used by Christian preachers against the astrological and pagan
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 193

associations of the seven-day planetary week. Indeed, Christian lead-

ers vehemently attacked the clearly widespread notion that the plan-
etary days influenced people’s lives. The manual by the African math-
ematician Hilarius, De Solstitiis, dated to the fourth or fifth century,
may be seen as representative of the types of arguments made at the
time (Dekkers and Gaar 1961:n. 2277). The Christians, Hilarius
claimed, were freed from planetary influences, for the stars are not
independent forces of nature, but the signs placed by the creator for
the computation of time. Christ, the Son of Justice, was born in
December (De Solstitiis PLS 1.567). The bishop Ambrose, another
Christian preacher interested in this topic, used this same reasoning
to explain how different and superior are Christian calculations of
time from pagan ones (Saint Ambrose, Letters 23.4; PL 16.1027;
Hexameron 4.6.25). And the late 4th century writer Ambrosiaster
(Quaestiones 84) saw Christian time reckoning as superior because,
even though both pagans and Christians use lunar days, Christians
know that they use lunar days because they were given by God to
establish the signs of the times, not because they determine the
nature of the day as auspicious or not. Since Ambrosiaster notes the
use of lunar days as acceptable, his text indicates too that the habit of
using the lunar cycle alongside the seven-day cycle persisted well
into the late 4th and early 5th centuries.
The vehemence of the Christian stand against the astrolog-
ical associations of the seven-day week is even more understandable
when we consider that in the fourth century, some Manicheans, like
the African Faustus, accused the Christians of adoring the sun and the
moon (Augustus Contra Faustum 15.2, 18.5; see also Pietri 1984).
Indeed, to counter this claim, some Christian leaders recommended
avoiding the astrological nomenclature of the week completely;
Philaster of Brescia in his Liber Adversus Omnes Haereses accused those
who think of the days of the week with their planetary names (e.g.
dies Saturni, dies Solis) as heretics (113; CC 279).
While some Christian preachers accepted the traditional
nomenclature for the seven-day week, others advocated using more
194 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

religiously sensitive language. In particular, they advocated calling

Sunday dies Dominica, the Lord’s day, and then numbering each succes-
sive day accordingly (i.e., the first day feria prima, the second day feria
secunda, etc.). In his Commentary on the Psalms, Augustine urged that
Christians be corrected when they referred to a day as belonging to a
deity, like that “of Mercury,” and should instead call it the fourth day,
since Christians “have their own language for such things” (Enarrationes
in Psalmos 93.3; CCSL 39, p.1302). And in the middle of the 5th centu-
ry, the Christian Polemius Silvius removed the planetary letters as well
as names of the days of the week from his calendar following along a
similar line of reasoning (Degrassi 1963:263—77). Indeed, the Gallic
bishop, Caesarius of Arles, was even more vociferous in condemning
the planetary days of the week; he cajoled his followers to refrain from
using such “demonic” terms, and to instruct their families to do the
same (Sermo 193.4; CCSL 104: 756-86)).
Yet even the most self-conscious of Christian preachers at
times found themselves slipping back into using the planetary names
for the days of the week; Jerome justified this habit by arguing,
among other things, that Christians can accept the pagan name dies
Solis, since that was the day on which the light of the world appeared
(In die dominica Paschae CC 78: 56). From such remarks it is clear that
for both pagans and Christians in the 4th century, the seven-day week
remained closely tied to its astrological roots, and the notion that the
planets influenced people on a daily basis remained widespread.

Sunday: Imperial and Christian Influences

But if pagans and Christians shared this astrological view of the

seven-day week, can the same be said for 4th century notions about
how to celebrate Sunday? To answer this, we need to step back in
time once more to look at evidence for Sunday among pagans and
Christians in the centuries before Constantine.
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 195

Here we find a significant difference between pagans and

Christians, for despite the recurrent assumption in modern scholar-
ship about the importance of the dies Solis in paganism, there is no
good evidence to indicate that pagans celebrated the dies Solis as a
religious holiday. There are, however, clear indications that the
Christians prior to Constantine did view Sunday as a day for ritual
and prayer.

Sunday before Constantine

We have already considered some of the iconographic evidence that
suggests that Sol within the context of the planetary week was espe-
cially important to Mithraists as well as to followers of Sol Invictus
in the centuries before Constantine. Some evidence exists that
Mithraists did celebrate important movements of the sun in the sky
at certain points throughout the year; that was what a group of
Mithras worshipers in Virunum in Noricum in the late second centu-
ry did at the summer solstice (Beck 1998). This is not surprising,
perhaps, since the winter solstice was popularly celebrated across the
Eastern and Western Empire; in Rome, on December 25th, the
Anniversary of the Sun, Natalis Solis, was celebrated with numerous
circus games, probably ever since the time of Aurelian in the late 3rd
century (Salzman 1990:149—53).
Some scholars, most notably Turcan (1993:100) and
Chastagnol (1978), have posited the idea that some Mithras worshipers,
and perhaps some Sol Invictus worshipers, influenced by Pythagorean
ideals, celebrated the dies Solis in the 3rd century. But an examination of
the Mithraic inscriptions in CIMRM, combined with an examination of
the Sol Invictus inscriptions in Halsberghe’s collection as well as those
in Dessau’s collection, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, provides no secure
evidence to support the notion that the day of the Sun was ritually com-
memorated by Mithraic worshipers or Pythagoreanists on a weekly
basis (Vermaseren 1956; Halsberge 1972).
196 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

The only evidence for pagans commemorating a day of the

week in honor of Sol comes from the Christian apologist, Tertullian.
In a passage from his Ad Nationes, Tertullian defends Christians against
the charge of Sun-worshiping by claiming that some pagans in
Carthage honored Sol by abstaining or delaying bathing, by resting
and by feasting. The passage is worth quoting:

13. 3. Vos certe estis, qui etiam in laterculum septem dierum

solem recepistis, et [. . .] ex diebus ipsorum praelegistis, quo
die lavacrum subtrahatis aut in vesperam differatis, aut otium
et prandium curetis. 4. Quod quidem facitis exorbitantes et
ipsi a vestris ad alienas religiones: Iudaei enim festi sabbata et
cena pura et Iudaici ritus lucernarum et ieiunia cum azymis
et orationes litorales, quae utique aliena sunt a diis vestris. 5.
Quare, ut ab excessu revertar, qui solem et diem eius nobis
exprobratis, agnoscite vicinitatem; non longe a Saturno et
sabbatis vestris sumus!

[13.3. You [pagans] are clearly the ones who have accepted
the sun as one of the seven-days of the week and [. . .] have
selected this one day over other days as the day on which
you do not take a bath or you postpone it until the evening,
or you take care to give yourself some rest and a meal. 4.
By resorting to these customs, you are deviating from your
own rites to those of others; indeed the Jewish feasts are the
Sabbath and the “purificatory dinner” and the ceremonies of
the lamps and fasting with unleavened bread and littoral
prayers, which are very alien from your gods. 5. You who
reproach us with the sun and the day, recognize your prox-
imity: we are not far from your Saturn and your Sabbaths!]
(1.13.1-5)*
* ‘| followed the text of Andre Schneider, Le Premier Livre Ad Nationes de
Tertullien, Introduction, Texte, Traduction et Commentaire. Rome: Institut Suisse, 1968.
Schneider accepts a crux before ex diebus and reads: “et [ . . . ] ex diebus ipsorum praelegis-
tis” as evidence for Sunday celebrations.
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 197

The crucial sentence in section 13.3 indicating that pagans

honored Sol on Sunday has been called into question on several
accounts. First, there are textual problems in the manuscripts in the
line before Tertullian’s claim that pagans honor Sol on Sunday.
Indeed, all scholars accept a crux in the manuscript, but there are
diverging opinions as to how to reconstruct the text. Some scholars
(Bacchioni 1977:248—51) read it as evidence for pagan worship on
Sundays, while others would emend the passage to read it as evi-
dence that pagans honor “the day preceding the day of the sun,” that
is Saturday, not Sunday (Rordorf 1968:32—38; Chastagnol 1978).
Indeed, this second reading would fit more comfortably with the
remainder of the passage, for Tertullian goes on to assert that pagans
are indulging in Jewish practices on the Sabbath, and that Christians
are close to these Sabbath practices. Moreover, we have ample testi-
mony that some pagans did mark the Sabbath, the day of Saturn;
these pagans were motivated either by reverence for the influence of
the planet Saturn as the first day of the astrological week, or in imi-
tation of the Jews; in Tertullian’s Apologeticus Chapter 16, where
Tertullian is once again defending Christians against the charge of
being Sun worshipers, Tertullian notes that Christians who devote
Sunday to rejoicing, “have some resemblance to those of you who
devote the day of Saturn to ease and luxury” (See also Flavius
Josephus Contra Apion 2.39.282). And finally, in a passage that actual-
ly contradicts his previous testimony in Ad Nationes 13.3, Tertullian
in De Idolatria 14.7 claims that pagans do not have weekly holidays,
only annual ones.
Certainty about the meaning of Tertullian’s evidence in Ad
Nationes 13.3 thus seems impossible, but even if we accept a reading
of that text as evidence for pagan practices on Sunday, the most we
can say is that some pagans in Carthage, presumably following solar
or Christian practice, marked Sunday as special with informal obser-
vances (such as abstention from bathing, feasting, or resting). It is
clear that such observances were not at all uniform; even in Carthage
in the 3rd century, some pagans recognized the day of Saturn, our
198 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Saturday, as a special day of the week, either because it was the first
day of the astrological week and/or in imitation of Jewish practice.
Thus Saturn was depicted first in the Codex Calendar of 354
(Salzman 1990:30—31). Moreover, if the pagan observances noted by
Tertullian on Sunday extended beyond Carthage, there has been no
trace of them identified in other texts.
In contrast, Sunday was the object of pastoral attention
among Christians, as early, some have argued, as the end of the Ist
century, when Ignatius, in Rome, wrote letters to various Churches,
in which he spoke of his Jewish converts as “no longer observing
Sabbaths, but living in accordance with the Lord’s day” (Epistle to the
Magnesians; see also Epistle to Barnabas and Teachings of the Twelve
Apostles), Clearer evidence of such practice is found in Justin who, in
the mid-2nd century, writes in his Apology to the emperor: “The day
of the Sun, we assemble, because it is the first day, on which God . .
. created the world and because on this day Jesus Christ, our Savior,
came back from the dead” (1.67.6). The association with Christ’s res-
urrection on Easter Sunday was echoed in later writers. Moreover,
according to Willy Rordorf (1968:238—73), who argued from the
textual evidence provided by Justin and Pliny, the 2nd century most
likely also saw a change from a Sunday evening worship meeting to
an early Sunday morning one, before daybreak.
The evidence from the 3rd century also indicates that
Sunday had not become the uniform day for prayer across the
empire’s Christian communities. Although Tertullian strongly advo-
cates Sunday as the only day for prayer among Christians in third cen-
tury North Africa, he also shows that some Christians there, as still
in many parts in the East, still followed the Jewish practice of special
prayers on Sabbath mornings as well as on Sunday mornings (De
Oratione 23.1). Indeed, Tertullian vehemently decries this practice
and the willingness of Christians to mark the Sabbath by fasting (De
Jejuniis 14ff.). His hostility toward Sabbath observances is echoed in
Rome by Hippolytus who, in the early third century, also preached
against this practice (Comm. In Dan. 4.20). The intent of both
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 199

Tertullian and Hippolytus seems clear: both wish to distinguish

Christian religious observances from the Jewish traditions of the
Sabbath and would focus on Sunday alone, not Saturday, as the day
for prayer. Although this had not yet happened in the 3rd century, it
was the focus of considerable Christian energy. Interestingly, none of
the third century sources I have seen, nor those surveyed by Rordorf
in his magisterial study of Sunday in the early Church, indicate that
Christians advocated making Sunday into a day of rest among
Christians; rather, their focus was on the religious rituals and prayer
appropriate to Sunday as the “Lord’s day” (Rordorf 1968:161; 1972).
Hence work on the remainder of Sunday was not prohibited.

Sunday: Constantine and After

The pre-Constantinian emphasis on the part of certain Christian
bishops on Sunday as a day for worship helps to explain why
Constantine's law of March 3, 321, to Helpidius, vicarius of Rome,
made the day of the Sun a legal holiday, “celebrated on account of its
own veneration” (Theodosian Code 2.8.1). In accord with Roman
practice, Constantine stipulated that legal transactions not be con-
ducted on this day. So, as early as 325, we see a judge deferring a law
case in Egypt because the proceedings would fall on Sunday
(Llewelyn and Nobbs 2002). However, according to the Theodosian
Code, acts of manumission and the emancipation of slaves, which
could now take place in church, were allowed on Sundays (2.8.1). In
the version of this law that survives in the Justinianic Code,
Constantine goes even further than traditional Roman holiday prac-
tice would require, indicating that not only judges, but even the
urban plebs and artisans of all types should rest on the venerable day
of the Sun; only agricultural workers are singled out for exception,
being advised to take advantage of good weather (Codex Justinianus
3.12.2). And market days, with their festival atmosphere, when
schools were normally closed, could be held on Sundays as well
200 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 3.4121; and for schools, see Andreau

2000). Yet, although Constantine made Sunday a legal holiday, none
of his extant legislation stipulates the pre-Constantinian Christian
idea that Sunday be a time to worship. Moreover, Constantine
referred to this holiday as dies Solis—literally the day of the Sun—not
by the already available Christian alternative—dies Dominica. Hence,
he used language that pagans were familiar with from astrology and
from the seven-day planetary week recorded in Roman calendars.
The language in Constantine’s law has perplexed some schol-
ars and fueled the desire to assess not only the impact of the law but
its intent. Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Life of
Constantine, sees only Christianizing fervor on the part of the emper-
or: “He decreed that the truly sovereign and really first day, the day of
the Lord and Savior, should be considered a regular day of prayer”
(4.18.1). But Eusebius’s testimony suggests that Constantine’s law was
more ambiguous than this statement would allow, for Eusebius contin-
ues in this passage to claim that a second decree of Constantine had
ordered all Christian soldiers to “revere the Day of Salvation, which
also bears the name of Light Day or Sun Day” by attending Church and
ordered all those who were not Christian to go “out of the city” to pray
to a nameless god of victories (4.18.1). Eusebius leaves the impression
that this decree covered the whole army, but, as the most recent com-
mentators to this Life have observed, it was probably only
Constantine’s garrison at Constantinople who were led “out of the
city” to pray (Cameron and Hall 1999:318). Moreover, Eusebius tells
us that the emperor urged these soldiers to “lift up their hands to heav-
en,” and “extend their mental vision yet higher [i.e., to the Sun] to the
heavenly King” (Life 4.19).
Despite Eusebius’s attempt to present Constantine’s actions
as consonant with Christian beliefs, the lifting of the hands to the
heavens and the exhortation to a nameless god of victories have sug-
gested to many that Constantine was aiming to appeal to pagan wor-
shipers of Sol Invictus; indeed, if Eusebius’s text can be believed, the
men in the army at Constantinople saw it this way. In this act,
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 201

Constantine may have been following in the footsteps of his rival,

Licinius, who had used such monotheistic prayers to encourage his
army in fighting against Maximin Daia (Bacchiocchi 1977:247-69;
Cameron and Hall 1999: 318).
Although there is no clear evidence that the dies Solis was
recognized as a pagan holiday before Constantine, pagans would see
the institution of such an official celebration as the emperor's prerog-
ative; that is what Aurelian had presumably done for Sol Invictus in
the late third century in instituting the Natalis Solis (see Halsberghe
1972:131-55). The language of the law—‘“the day of the sun
deserves veneration”’—would have appealed to Sol and Mithras wor-
shipers; indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that pagans were
offended at what appears a truly innovative holiday established by
Constantine. But, in 321, it also seems clear that Constantine was
eager to unite the Western Church behind him before going off to
fight Licinius in the East. The clergy in Rome and Italy were especial-
ly eager to make Sunday—not the Sabbath—the Christian day of
worship (Bacchiocchi 1977:207—12). Thus, the 321 law appears as
one of a number of laws that shows Constantine’s willingness to
shape his cult to his immediate political demands.
It is not until some 65 years later that we hear in law an
emperor specifying that Sunday is intended as a holiday for
Christians; and not until then do we find emperors showing a
heightened sensitivity to the pagan associations of the language of
the planetary week. In a law of Gratian, Valentinian and Theodosius
in 386, we hear that the “day of the Sun [dies Solis] which our ances-
tors rightly called the Lord’s Day [dies Dominica],” be a public holi-
day with no court business or legal suits. Moreover, this 386 law is
the first extant law to indicate that worship was expected on this
day: “That person shall be adjudged not only infamous but also sac-
rilegious who turns from the inspiration and ritual of holy religion”
(Theodosian Code 2.18.1). The importance of Sunday for Christians
also emerges in a law dated between 368 and 373 which stipulated
that “no Christian be sued by a tax collector on Sunday, a day which
202 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

has long been considered holy, or propitious” (Theodosian Code

8.8.1).
Still, the more traditional, pagan notion of Sunday —not as
a day of prayer and veneration but as a Roman holiday— persisted
throughout 4th century imperial law. Not until 392 were circus
games prohibited on the festal days of the Sun, and even then, excep-
tions were made for the birthdays of the emperors. Imperial games
were only prohibited by Theodosius and Honorius in 409 (Theodosian
Code 2.8.20, 392 CE; 2.8.25, 409 CE). It had taken some 90 years
since Constantine first ushered in Sunday as a legal holiday for the
pagan idea of how to celebrate a Roman holiday in honor of the Sun
to be removed from imperial law.

Sunday: A New Way of Organizing Time?

The gradual implementation of the Christian notion of Sunday as a

day of worship—not circus games—leads to my final area for discus-
sion: did the seven-day week, anchored on Sunday, replace other
methods used for dating and organizing peoples’ lives in the 4th cen-
tury? We know that people had already used the seven-day week as a
dating convention in private inscriptions from the second and thirrd
centuries and in some calendars and parapegmata. But people tend-
ed to use the seven-day cycle alongside. other dating conventions,
that is, along with dating by Kalends, Nones, and Ides, by the market
cycle usually of eight days, and/or by the lunar cycle of ten days. But,
can we see a real change in use and in convention in the 4th century,
under the pressure of Constantine’s laws and the preaching by
Christian leaders about the importance of reconfiguring the days of
the seven-day week around the dies Dominica? Or, to put it more sim-
ply, how much more did the people of the 4th century use the seven-
day week to organize activities in their lives?
To try to answer both of these questions, Charles Pietri in
an influential article in 1984 looked at a body of 150 Christian funer-
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 203

ary inscriptions from Rome (70%) and Italy (30%) that mention the
days of the week. He claimed that Christians particularly noted the
days of the week, indicating Fridays (32 times) and Sundays (31)
most often, followed by Saturdays (21), Thursdays (21), Wednesdays
(19), Mondays (17), and last, Tuesdays (9). Christians preferred to
use dies Dominica (or the Greek equivalent, hemera kyriake) to dies
Solis. This body of inscriptions showed one person out of 30 referring
to a day of the week. Moreover, Pietri claimed, this number
increased over time. More than half of the inscriptions are from the
period 366—440. So, Pietri (1984) concluded, “Everything indicates
that this specifically Christian habit introduced itself into the funer-
ary formulae of the 4th century and increased noticeably thereafter”
(77). On the basis of this analysis, Pietri argued that it was the
Christians who adopted the language of the seven-day week and were
hence responsible for making it, along with Sunday as a day of wor-
ship, normative practice as early as the middle of the fourth century.
It is surprising that Pietri did no comparative work on
pagan inscriptions from Rome and Italy to make his case secure. And,
as he himself noted, his corpus of 150 Christian inscriptions was
weighted toward the most faithful, being drawn from catacombs and
churches. Thus, Pietri’s assumptions about the willingness of
Christians to adopt the seven-day week were not tested against a
comparable group of pagan inscriptions in order to say with any
degree of certainty that Christians over and above pagans adopted
the seven-day week in their funerary monuments.
There are difficulties in pursuing such a comparison of con-
temporary pagan inscriptions, not the least of which is the survival
of inscriptions from non-Christian contexts in the 4th century and
the conversion of the population at large. But given these limitations,
some comparative analysis can be undertaken. There are several col-
lections of inscriptions from the most active pagan cults in Rome and
Italy in the 4th century. I examined specific collections for four of
these cults—Mithras, Isis, Magna Mater, and Sol—as well as the use
of dating terminology in the 10,000 inscriptions from H. Dessau’s
204 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae and in the thousands of inscriptions from

the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Volume 6 from Rome. The pagan
inscriptions I isolated included: 220 Isis and Sarapis inscriptions from
Rome and Italy (Vidman 1969:189-—271), 478 Magna Mater inscrip-
tions from Rome and Italy (Vermaseren 1977), the collection of Sol
inscriptions from Rome and Italy by Halsberghe which included
seven inscriptions specifically dated to the fourth century
(Halsberghe 1972:162—75), and 603 Mithraic inscriptions from Italy
(Vermaseren CIMRM). I also isolated numerous pagan inscriptions in
ILS, and in the inscriptions from CIL VI indexed in Corpus
Inscriptionum Latinarum VI part 7. 2 (ed. Jory and Moore 1975); this
last collection included over twenty pages of references to dies but
only four new inscriptions recording the day of the week (i.e., dies
Saturni, dies Lunae, dies Mercurii, and dies ovis).
My examination of the epigraphic evidence from the Latin
West was not restricted to funerary monuments, as Pietri’s had
been, but included dedicatory as well as honorific monuments. I
found that when pagans did include dates in their inscriptions, by and
large they used the traditional dating by Kalends, Nones, and Ides
along with consular year. On funerary monuments, the convention
was to include the length of life, and if the date of death was includ-
ed, it was generally so noted by Kalends, Nones, and Ides. Those
funerary inscriptions noting the days of the week made up a very
small group, no more than forty all told. Hence, my overview of
pagan inscriptions would seem to support Pietri’s claim that
Christians were more open to using the seven-day week in their
inscriptions than were their pagan peers in the fourth century.
Why some 4th century Christians noted the days of the
week in their funerary inscriptions is worth considering. Unlike
pagans, Christians tended to note the date of death and/or date of
burial (depositio) on their monuments for theological reasons; the day
of death and/or day of burial represented the beginning of a new life,
an anniversary (natalis) by traditional Roman thinking (Ferrua 1920;
Grossi Gondi 1920).
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 205

But the habit of noting death or burial by the day of the

planetary week suggests other influences. Some scholars have
explained this practice by emphasizing the on-going influence of
astrology on 4th century Christians who would view the planet of
their “birth” into a new life as still exercising influence over them
after death.(Schtrrer 1905). Others would explain this epigraphic
habit by emphasizing the influence of the Jewish seven-day week
(Kajanto 1977). Still others would emphasize the exertions made by
Christian bishops who were eager to change the astrological beliefs
of their flocks by stressing the seven-day week revolving around the
Lord’s Day; their efforts would then be seen as key to developing this
particular epigraphic habit among 4th century Christians (Pietri
1984),
Even if Christians did use the days of the seven-day week in
their funerary monuments more readily than pagans, they—like
their pagan peers—continued to use the other conventional ways of
dating by Kalends, Nones, and Ides and by consular year. The nomen-
clature for the seven-day week did not replace traditional dating con-
ventions in these fourth century Christian inscriptions; rather, the
days of the week were added to the inscriptions, and only in a rela-
tively small number of cases, as had been the case in the small num-
ber of pre-Constantinian pagan examples (Handley 2003).
A more important limitation on Pietri’s view of the impor-
tance of the Christian epigraphic habit lies in the nature of the evi-
dence. Neither these funerary monuments nor the 4th century impe-
rial laws can tell us what we want to know about how people mind-
ed their time, that is how much more than before did fourth centu-
ry people rely on the seven-day week— rather than the eight day
market cycle or the ten day lunar cycle— to organize and schedule
their daily lives. Here, we must turn to sparse, anecdotal evidence.
The Codex Calendar of 354, with its three weekly cycles of
seven, eight, and ten days each, suggests that the seven day week had
not yet gained a monopoly over the way people organized their time.
Random references to the ongoing use of lunar days and hence ten
206 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

day lunar cycles is documented for the fourth and fifth centuries.
(See the Parapegma from the Baths of Trajan in A. Degrassi
1963:299, 326, and references to lunar days by Ambrosiaster,
Quaestiones 84). The evidence for market cycles is of interest, for it
provides another important way for people to allocate commercial
and social time.
Both seven-and eight-day market cycles have a long history
in the Roman empire, and there is evidence to suggest that both
cycles coexisted into the 4th century. The eight-day market cycle was
in use first; its appearance in an official, military context in 3rd cen-
tury Dura-Europus is one indicator of how wide spread it had become
in Roman life (Snyder: 1936). The seven-day market cycle emerged
alongside the eight-day one in the first century CE in Campania
(Andreau 2000: 88-91). Interesingly, these were not the only two
cycles for organizing markets; in North Africa, markets were held on
either a 12-or 18-day cycle (Shaw 1981). Elsewhere, they could be
held on a twice-monthly basis (de Ligt 1993). These variations in
market frequency indicate that market cycles varied by region. The
effort to establish a seven-day market in the newly rebuilt town of
Aquae Iasae, Pannonia, at the time of Constantine has earlier prece-
dents, and fits easily with this emperor’s professed goal of making
Sunday and the seven day week the primary means of organizing time
in the 4th century (Andreau 2000 for earlier precedents; Shaw
1981:45). However, it is of interest that the establishment of a seven
day market cycle is at odds with the Christian and allegedly
Constantinian notion that Sunday be a day of worship and rest.
The seven-day cycle was familiar in private and, after
Constantine’s recognition of Sunday as a holiday, was becoming
increasingly important within legal and commercial contexts as well.
However, the evidence also suggests that the seven-day week was not
yet exclusively used across the empire in the 4th century. Moreover,
the habit of dating by the days of the week appeared in only a small
percentage of Christian inscriptions and did not become the norm in
the 4th century or soon thereafter. Dating by the Kalends, Nones,
 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN NOTIONS OF THE WEEK 207

and Ides remained standard and persisted as such well in the 7th cen-
tury in the west (Ware 1976).

Conclusion
On the basis of these studies, it would seem that pagans and
Christians in the 4th century were much more alike in their notions
of the week than Christian preachers were willing to admit. Both
pagans and Christians were familiar with and used a seven-day cycle;
both were familiar with the astrological associations of each day; both
used the planetary names of the days of the week. In these ways, and
in the willingness of certain Christian leaders to justify the Christian
use of the planetary names of the days of the week, we see a Christian
leadership influenced by pagan notions of the week attempting to
maintain continuities with their pagan contemporaries.
At the same time, pagans and Christians did have different
notions of Sunday; only for the Christians do we have evidence of this
day as being marked as a day of worship on a weekly basis, both before
and after Constantine. Imperial law, along with Christian preaching,
furthered this notion among pagans as well as Christians. But pagan
notions of how to celebrate a traditional Roman holiday in honor of
Sol, as begun by Constantine, did persist, as indicated by the ongoing
celebration of circus games and market days on Sundays. Sunday was
still seen by many as the day of the Sun, dies Solis—not the day of the
Lord, dies Dominica—through the end of the 4th century.
Finally, we ought not rely on funerary inscriptions or impe-
rial laws to tell us when the Christian notion of the seven-day week
revolving around Sunday as a day of religious observance and rest
came to be used exclusively to organize people’s time; the seven-day
week did not replace other ways of organizing time in the 4th centu-
ry. Thus, given how gradual was the adoption of celebrating Sunday
as a holiday, it seems likely that uniformity in using the seven-day
week to regulate people’s activities was a post-4th century phenom-
208 TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

enon. Only in the 5th century in the West could that be said to be the
case, but by then, as the 3rd century author of the Didascalia so pre-
sciently put it, “all days belong[ed] to the Lord” (6.18.16).

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 e @ CONTRIBUTORS @ e

JOHN C. BARRETT, Professor, Department of Archaeology,

University of Sheffield.

MARC BRETTLER, Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies,

Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis
University.

CHRIS GOSDEN, Lecturer and Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

ASTRID MOLLER, Affiliated Scholar, Department of Ancient

History, University of Freiburg.

DavID PANKENIER, Professor of Chinese, Department of Modern

Languages and Literature, Lehigh University.

ALEX PURVES, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics,

University of California, Los Angeles.

ELEANOR ROBSON, Lecturer, Department of the History and

Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

LuDO ROCHER, W. Norman Brown Professor of South Asian

Studies Emeritus, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

RALPH M. ROSEN, Professor, Department of Classical Studies,

University of Pennsylvania.

MICHELE RENEE SALZMAN, Professor, Department of History,

University of California, Riverside.
akitu 49, 58, 70, 81, 82 China 7, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136,
astrolabes 51 141, 144, 145
al-Biruni 91 Chronicles 120, 172
Alfred's Castle 4, 36-43 chronography 8, 9, 170, 173, 175,
Apollodorus 177, 179 177, 180, 182, 183
Aristotle 175, 177, 179, 180 clay tablets 4, 47
Ashur 45, 46, 49, 58-70, 81, 85 climate 32, 114
Assyria 4, 45-90 Codex Calendar of 354 185, 186,
astrology 81, 135, 188, 190, 198, 205
200, 205 Confucianism 132
astronomical 5, 46, 52, 56, 72, 77, Constantine 9, 185-87, 192, 194,
80, 81, 131 195, 199-202, 206—208
astronomy 5, 48, 77, 79, 80, 82 cosmos 89, 100, 106, 132, 135, 137.
Augustine 194 147, 155

Babylonia 4, 45—90 Dead Sea scrolls 120, 125, 126

Bali 143 Deuteronomistic history 115-27
Bible 6, 111-124 dharma 93
bit rimki 73, 81, 82 diastema 171
Book of Changes 7, 133-39, 145 dies soli 9
Brahma 94, 95, 103 divination 80-89, 134—135
Bronze Age 3, 12, 18-26, 34-42 Dong Zhongshu 7, 138, 140, 142
Buddhism 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 105
burial 4, 22, 25, 26, 160, 204, 205 Ecclesiastes 6, 112-118, 124-125,
127
calendar 11, 51-68, 82, 114, 135, eclipse 46, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79
148. 185, 186, 194, 198, 205 "end of days" 120
celestial motion 72 Enuma Elish (Epic of Creation) 49, 52
 INDEX 215

epic of Gilgamesh 48, 69, 80, 81, 85 jing 141

Esarhaddon 56—59, 61, 63, 66—73, Judges, Book of 6, 115-21, 124—
76, 84 26, 199
eschatology 120, 121, 123, 125, 127 Jupiter 56, 73, 141
eschaton 120 Juvenal 188
eternal return 102, 104, 106
Eusebius 170, 174-184, 200 kalpa 5, 94-102
event and process 13, 15, 19 kalutu 76, 77, 79, 81, 82
karma 103
funerary 26, 189, 202—207 kinship 22, 32, 44
Knitting 144
Geertz, C. 138, 143 Kronos 155, 159, 162, 164
Genesis 119, 122, 123
Gezer calendar 114 landscape 26, 32-38, 43, 44
Large ditch systems see Linear ditch
Hellanicus of Lesbos 170 Linear ditch 4, 35—36, 38, 42
hemerologies 65—68, 80, 81, 87 lunar year 82
Hesiod 7, 8, 93, 147—68
Hexagram 7, 139 Mahabharata 98
Hinduism 94—104 Malinowski, J. 143
Hippias of Elis 8, 173, 176 Manusmriti 95, 98, 101
Homer, Iliad 158, 160 megalithic tombs 24
Homer, Odyssey 158, 162 mortuary 17, 24, 25
Muses 155, 156
incantations 63, 76, 77, 80, 81
India 5, 91-110 Nabu temple scholars 81
intercalary year 56 namburbu 68, 76, 80, 81, 82
Iphitus, founder of the Olympic Neolithic 19, 24, 34
Games 176—80 Ninurta 62, 74, 75, 76
Iron Age 4, 33-43, 149, 150, 151,
152, 154 Olympic games 8, 169-84
Olympionikon anagraphé 1'74—80
Jainism 95-101, 110 omen 1, 63, 67, 70, 72, 80, 81, 87
ji 132, 133, 141 Ouranos 155, 158—64
216 INDEX

Paleolithic 19 subsistence and political economies 22

pancangas 91 Sumer 63
Pandora 152, 153, 154, 159, 167 Sun worship 197
parapegmata 189, 202 synchronicity 145
pithos 149-53, 159, 167
planetary position 78 Tartaros 162, 163, 164, 165
portent 46, 68 Tertullian 196, 197, 198, 199
prediction 48, 55, 77 Theodosian Code 185, 199, 201, 202
prophetic literature 120, 121, 122 Titans 158, 162, 163, 164
Puranas 98, 104, 109 Trobriand 143, 144
wei 132, 141
Rhea 148, 155, 159 West Kennet 24, 25
Rigveda 94, 96, 101-104, 107 world ages 5, 91-93, 99-105
Roman Britain 42
Romanization 4, 34, 43 yin-yang 131, 134, 135
yuga 5, 93, 95-103, 109
seasons 8, 32, 36, 40, 56, 105, 118,
135, 147, 152 Zerubavel, E. 124, 128, 186, 187,
Septuagint 115, 120, 122, 126 210
seven-day week 185—210 Zeus 8, 152-165
solar year 55, 56 Zielinski,T. 157, 158, 159, 165, 166,
Spartan king list 177, 179, 180 168
spells 63 zodiac 77, 189
structural history 12, 14, 19 Zuo zhuan 132, 145