Ancient Egyptian Calendar
The calculator converts an Ancient Egyptian date to Gregorian date and vice versa.
The ancient Egyptian calendar is a 365 days solar calendar. The calendar year consists of 3 seasons; each season has 4 months, each month has 3 decades (weeks) of 10 days each. Every year ends with additional 5 days (epagomenal days), which gives 365 days in total. There were no leap years to make the calendar in sync with the tropical year, so the calendar loses one solar day every four years. There was no single date in the past from which ancient Egyptians started to keep years; instead, the years count restarted each time a new pharaoh began his reign. To align the Egyptian calendar with the contemporary calendar, we must know the pharaohs' accession year. The calculators below use Ptolemy canon of kings, which contains pharaoh regnal periods starting from Babylonian king Nabonassar (747 BCE) up to Roman Aelius Antoninus (161 CE)1. Assuming the new year day of Nabonassar's first reign year as of Feb 26th 747 BCE (Julian)2, we can calculate Gregorian dates corresponding to ancient Egyptian ones.
This calculator converts an ancient Egyptian date to a Gregorian date.
Ancient Egyptian date to Gregorian date
The calculator below converts a Gregorian date to an Ancient Egyptian date.
Gregorian date to Ancient Egyptian date
The calculators use algorithms from the Calendrical Calculations book by Dershowitz and Reingold3.
The ancient Egyptian calendar summary
| Calendar type | fixed |
| Place | Egypt |
| Days in a year | 365 |
| Effective date | about 25th century BCE |
| End date | 1st century CE (Egypt), used by medieval astronomers |
| Epoch | Vary. The years' count was restarted when a new pharaoh began his reign. |
| Month count | 13 |
| Days in a week | 10 |
| Days in a year | 365 |
| Days in a month | 30, 5 |
| Leap year | none |
| Previous calendar | Egyptian lunar calendar |
| Next calendar | Coptic calendar |
Seasons
| Season # | Season name | Months | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Akhet | 4 | 120 |
| 2 | Peret | 4 | 120 |
| 3 | Shemu | 4 | 120 |
| Epagomenal Days | 0 | 5 |
Month names
| Month # | Month name | Another name | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I Akhet | Thoth | 30 |
| 2 | II Akhet | Phaophi | 30 |
| 3 | III Akhet | Athyr | 30 |
| 4 | IV Akhet | Choiak | 30 |
| 5 | I Peret | Tybi | 30 |
| 6 | II Peret | Mechir | 30 |
| 7 | III Peret | Phamenoth | 30 |
| 8 | IV Peret | Pharmuthi | 30 |
| 9 | I Shemu | Pachons | 30 |
| 10 | II Shemu | Payni | 30 |
| 11 | III Shemu | Epiphi | 30 |
| 12 | IV Shemu | Mesore | 30 |
| 13 | Epagomenal Days | - | 5 |
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