JHA, x (1979), 1-2: Copyright © 1979 by Willy Hartner THE YOUNG AVESTAN AND BABYLONIAN CALENDARS AND THE ANTECEDENTS OF PRECESSION WILLY HARTNER, Frankfurt University To O. Neugebauer, in admiration Preliminary Note and Summary The present article deals with three different topics: two calendar systems, which are shown to have been introduced in their definitive shape on the same day (vernal equinox, —502 = 5038.c.), and the question of the earliest demonstrable distinction made by astronomers between the sidereal and the tropical year lengths. These problems are so closely interwoven that they must be treated jointly, the more so because all that has been said hitherto about the “Young Avestan” or “’Mazdayasnian™ calendar (the term “Young Avestan” is commonly used in distinction to a hypothetical “Old Avestan" calendar, about which nothing definite is known; “Mazdayasnian™ is derived from the name of the highest Iranian god, Ahura Mazda), which plays a decisive part in the ensuing demonstrations, is based on erroneous premises and conjectures and, therefore, necessarily wrong. As for the Babylonian calendar, it has so far been overlooked that the 19-year cycle (19 = 235 synodic months) which, due to an extraordinary coincidence, furnishes an excellent approximation of the tropical year” A = 365:2468223¢, was made its basis in the same year, —$02. Since the length of the Young Avestan religious year is practically identical with that of the Babylonian System B, we thus are faced with the remarkable fact that in the year 19 of Darius 1 two calendars founded on two different year lengths, the sidereal and the tropical, were inaugurated simultaneously. An explicit value, moreover, for the length of 18 tropical years (I8 At = 1,49,34;25,27,18¢ = 6574-424254, whence Ar = 365;14,44,51¢ = 36524579174) is found in a procedure text from the Seleucid period (ACT no. 210). It cannot but have been derived from equinox or solstice observations, by analogy with the method employed later by Hipparchus. The question whether Hipparchus started out on his research on the precession of the equinoxes wholly inde pendently or whether some pertinent information had reached him together with the attested Babylonian parameters to which he had recourse in his work, will have to remain unanswered here. He knew, however, as borne out by a passage from his “On intercalary months and years” (A/magest III, 1), that the “Metonic’ 19-year cycle furnishes a year length which is very close to that of the tropical year. Like the Babylonian, the Old Persian calendar (in use before the introduction of the later Young Avestan) was also luni-solar. On the basis of the scanty and defective documentation extant (Behistan inscription, Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Tablets of the 19th, —502/01, and of the 22nd year of Darius, ~499/98), correspondencies between the Persian, Elamite and Babylonian month names have been established, from which it can be seen that the Persian and Elamite intercalations do not follow the same rules as the Babylonian. As Copyright © 2011 FroCuest LC. Al sighs rserved. Coprigh © Science Hatory Publications