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considered the heliacal rising of Sirius as being the first day of their calendar, and indeed called this event the ‘opener of the year’ throughout their 3,000-year history, they nonetheless obstinately refused to have a leap year. The question begs the asking: why such obstinacy? Why didn’t they simply add an extra day every four years to keep the calendar in synch with the heliacal rising of Sirius?
     
    The answer, as we shall now see, lies in the simple fact that the ancient Egyptians did not compute their calendar in a linear manner starting from some event (such as the birth of Christ) and moving towards infinity, but in a cycle that always returned to its point of origin. In other words, to the Egyptians time was not linear but cyclical.
     

Year Zero: The Great Return
     
    Our Western Christian culture has fixed ‘year zero’ of our calendar with the birth of Jesus, which is assumed to have happened 2,005 years ago (as I am writing this).
     
    When was the ‘year zero’ of the ancient Egyptians?
     
    Before we look into this, I first want to dispense with a misnomer regarding the Egyptian calendar. Modern Egyptologists call the ancient Egyptian calendar the ‘civil calendar’, which, annoyingly, gives the impression that the ancient Egyptians were essentially dull civil servants who devised a calendar fixing work and feast days and for levying taxes on livestock and suchlike tedious municipal and administrative tasks. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. For one, the term civil calendar is not from the ancient Egyptians but comes from the more pedestrian Romans. It first appeared in the third century AD in a book titled Die Natali by the Roman chronicler Censorinus who prosaically wrote that ‘their (the Egyptians’) complete civil year has 365 days without a single intercalary day’. 19 But the truth is that the Egyptian calendar was predominantly religious and was thought of as some kind of cosmic instrument with which the cosmic order could be regulated on earth. The Egyptian calendar was not civil but divine. I shall, however, reluctantly stick to the term ‘civil calendar’ to avoid confusion.
     
    The civil calendar was divided in the following manner: 12 months of 30 days, with each month having three weeks or ‘decades’ of 10 days. The 12 months amounted to 360 days, to which were then added five days known as the Epagomenal Days or ‘Five Days upon the Year’, thus making up the full 365-day year. The Egyptian year had only three seasons of four months each. These were: First Season, called Akhet, meaning inundation, from months I to IV; Second Season called Peret or Proyet, meaning emergence or coming forth, from months V to VIII; Third Season, called Shemu, meaning harvest, from months IX to XII. Originally the months were not given names but only numbers from one to twelve. The first day of the first month of the First Season was known as I Akhet 1, i.e. month I, season Akhet, day 1. Later in the New Kingdom the months received official names: I Thoth, II Phaopi, III Athyr, IV Choiak, V Tybi, VI Mechir, VII Phamenoth, VIII Pharmuti, IX Pachons, X Payni, XI Epiphi and XII Mesore. 20 Egyptologists and historians can never agree how old the Egyptian calendar is. There is, however, much evidence to support the conclusion that it was already in place during the Old Kingdom, for in the Pyramid Texts there are several passages that allude to it indirectly:
    Osiris appears, the sceptre is pure, the Lord of Right is exalted at the First of the Year . . . The Lord of wine in flood, his season has recognised him . . . The sky has conceived him, the dawn has reborn him, and this king is conceived with him in the sky, this king is reborn with him in the sky . . . the king has gone up from the east of the sky . . . 21
     
     
     
    The king passes the night (in his tomb) . . . and the shrine is opened for him when Ra (the sun) shines. The king ascends . . . in the presence of Ra on