The Persian Calendar

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. British Institute of Persian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Iran.The calendar of the Iranians before Islam has been the subject of an extremely large mass of literature, in the West beginning in the Age of Enlightenment with works by Scaliger and Hyde and extending down to a recent contribution by Boris Marshak in the pages of thisjournal.' To review all of these studies would be a futile undertaking; if one is to write at all on such a well-exercised subject one might as well say something new rather than repeating and criticising what has been said before. In the following we shall consequently limit ourselves to a re-examination of the primary sources in oriental languages and restrict citations of secondary literature almost entirely to basic philological matters.The present study concerns only the Persian calendar and its close relatives in Sogdiana, Choresmia and Armenia. The most ancient forms of time-keeping in Iran, namely the early Avestan, Elamite and Old-Persian luni-solar calendars, are the subject of a separate study, which we hope to publish in the very near future. Readers might find it convenient, on first perusal of these pages, to concentrate on the first, fourth and fifth sections, and to skim over the others, as these are not central to the argument. Beru-ni's description of the Persian calendarThe most comprehensive account that we possess of Iranian calendars is that given by the famous Muslim scientist 3Ab i Rayhan al-Bayrfini (in Persian: Berini)2 is his early work al-'M•iru 1-bdqiya Cani 1-quru-ni 1-xdliya3 which he wrote about the year 1000, and which is complimented in a few important points by two of his later works, Kitabu t-tafhim ii 'awd~ili sindcati t-tanjim4 and al-Qdnuinu 1-mascfidi5 the latter written in 1030. His description specifically of the Persian calendar (as opposed to the Sogdian and Choresmian varieties of Iranian chronology) has two rather different components: on the one hand an empirical description of the workings of the calendar which was actually used by the Persian Zoroastrians of his own day, and on the other a reconstruction of the pre-history of that calendar, under the Sasanians and earlier, and an aetiological explanation for the peculiarities of its workings. The main argument of the present paper is that while Berfini's empirical description both of the Persian, and of the other Iranian calendars, is unquestionably correct, his account of its history is a legend.The acceptance of this legend, in one form or another, by the majority of modern scholars6 is the main cause of the confusion which has enshrouded the history of Iranian time-keeping before Islam.The empirical facts...

Achaemenid Religion

“…A special problem arose from the fact that about 490 BCE, the calendar known from post‐Avestan Zoroastrian texts had been adopted in Cappadocia and, presumably, in the entire empire (de Blois , Panaino , pp. 665–66, , ).…”

On the concept of leadership and the office of Leader of the Zoroastrians (hu-dēnān pēšōbāy) in Abbasid Zoroastrianism

“…Two Arabic sources report this calendar reform as well. According to these Arabic sources, the reform must have happened in the year 1006 (de Blois 1996). The Riwāyat ī Farnbay-srōš is dated to the year 377 of Yazdgird (= 1008/9 ce ) and shows that at least some priests in Khorasan did not accept the reform for some years.…”