Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. I'm excited to be bringing you this episode today, which is maybe a little bit of a different flavor than some of the other ones we've had before. I'm gonna be talking about the seasons in ancient Egypt. And perhaps for many of us, this might seem like a little bit of an odd time to talk about this. Right now, when I'm recording, it's around the beginning of June. And I know we tend to think about things like calendars and seasons and stuff. Oftentimes, at least here in the modern West, we tend to think about those things maybe more around like the New Year's holidays and things like that. Here we are in June. It's not even officially the change of a season yet. But I got thinking about this for a couple of different reasons. One feels very much like summer, where I am, although technically it's by the solar standards not summer yet, because we haven't hit the solstice yet. However, I live in the southern United States where it's quite hot already, and school is out, already been out for a while. So very much feels like summer here. And in addition, in my higher level program, Master Scribes, we have been reading some larger sections of the letters written by a man named Hecanacht. And Hecanacht, if uh you haven't heard my earlier podcast episode about him, you can go back and check that out. But just to give a brief description of him, he was a landowner during the early Middle Kingdom period who also had work on the side part of the year as a priest. And so he was away from home to fulfill his priestly duties and was writing home with instructions for his family. And we have um different letters of his and some account documents and things like that that have survived. And a lot of his letters, um, or a lot of the contents of his letters, I should say, have to do with basically responding to his household members' complaints. We don't have the letters from his family members and other household members who worked for him, but clearly they must have been complaining about things and a lot of them because he's responding to that, particularly about how much income they're getting from him. And so in one of these letters, letter two, which we've been reading part of, he's basically going on about how they should be happy with their pay that they have, their rations, however you want to phrase that, because times are really hard. Things are really tight everywhere, and it's going really badly for a lot of people. So they should be grateful for what they have. And, you know, he's kept them alive so far. He actually says that. And so they should be, you know, counting themselves lucky, essentially. And so at one point, he basically says to them, you just need to be brave and essentially suck it up until I get back. And he says, Look, I'm going to spend Shamu here. So this got me thinking about seasons two, because what is shemu? Shemu is the name of one of the seasons in ancient Egypt. It's one that we typically translate as harvest season. It actually means something related to the water being very low because this is actually the end of the ancient Egyptian year, is shemu. It is the harvest season and the season when the Nile River was very low before the new flood would happen again. And as it happens, right now at this time of year would be approximately around the end of Shemu, around the end of the ancient Egyptian year, because the Nile started to flood in Egypt. So between modern Aswan and the end of the Delta, basically started to flood in June. There could be a little variation, of course, but it's pretty routine with how it did. And so the Egyptian New Year actually typically would have, if it was following a solar-based calendar and keeping that consistent, at least, it does change over time, would have started in the middle of June. And this seems to be how they originally set up this calendar with the three seasons they had. They didn't have four seasons, they had three. They're not set up the way that we use today in the modern west with our four seasons based on temperature changes and things like that. These were based on the agricultural calendar, as you might have gathered from Shamu being related to the harvest season and the low Nile. So it all revolves around the Nile, the level of water, and therefore what you could be doing farming-wise based on that. So the first season started with the flood of the Nile, which also corresponded with about the same time as the rising of Sirius, or when it would be seen again after it had been not visible for a couple of months. And so this marked the new year, although I alluded to some changes over time. And this is because the ancient Egyptian year had 365 days in it, which sounds pretty good, especially thousands of years ago, right? But they weren't accounting for that extra approximate quarter of a day. It's actually slightly less than a quarter of a day, in addition to that per year that there is in a solar year. And therefore, even though these seasons were named for what you were doing at that time of year and related to that, they actually drift. So you could end up with what was technically the flood season actually happening in the winter, technically on the calendar, even though obviously the flood still happens in the summer. So it does change over time, but it's originally established as a linking to these times. So when we think of this time of year around June, depending on where you live, this might be kind of the time of year things come alive for you. If you live in the northern hemisphere and in one of the colder areas of the northern hemisphere, if you live in the southern hemisphere, of course, you're going to be experiencing the opposite where it's getting colder. And um, if you live somewhere like I do, which is in the northern hemisphere, but a hotter area, this is the time of year actually, well, technically, yeah, things are alive, like the trees are green and stuff, but in general, it's kind of a slowing down kind of time. Not the biggest agricultural season, actually, because it gets quite hot in the summer and it's hard to grow very many things when it is that hot. So, in a way, where I am, the agricultural schedule is a little bit like it was in ancient Egypt in terms of the times of year that they're growing things because of that. So, one of the things that got me thinking about is not only okay, how do the seasons work in ancient Egypt, which I'm going to tell you a bit more about, but also the fact that a lot of times in at least in the modern West, we tend to focus very heavily on New Year's, that is January 1st, as this point of renewal and this time of starting over, this time to set goals, this time to try new things and maybe pick up a hobby that you dropped before, or you know, renew your goals, whether they have to do with, say, your health or learning ancient Egyptian, perhaps, things like that. But I wanted to point out that this is not anything that's actually sort of set in stone or that's universal in any kind of way. Because when you look at ancient Egypt, the new year and this sense of renewed hope, renewed idea of growth all really comes about actually during the summer and into the early fall when the Nile flooded and then receded, leaving this wonderful topsoil that the ancient Egyptians could plant in. And so I point this out just to point out that any time of year is a wonderful year to start something new or get a renewed energy for something, even if it's really hot and doesn't feel like a real energetic time for you, like it does here for me. And this is a wonderful time to get back to whatever that thing is that you really want to do, or that you're passionate about, or that you feel very strongly about, that this time is absolutely as good as any. And you can look at it as like, hey, it's a new year, it's the Egyptian New Year, right? So the Egyptian New Year probably originally started around the middle of June by our modern Gregorian calendar. And of course, like I said, it drifted around time. But if we want to go with sort of the original linking it to the flood, it would have been around that time. And the flood continued on through September and to some extent into October a bit. And it got actually more intense really in the later summer months. It's a little bit slower at this time as it just gets going in June. And then the waters would start to recede, and this is when you get into the second season in ancient Egypt called Parrot. And I don't think I said the name of the first one, right? During the flood season in ancient Egyptian, this is called Akit. So after Akit, which is four months, the ancient Egyptians, I mentioned the 365 days. They did have 12 months, but each month was an equal length of 30 days. So if you're doing the math with me here, that is 360 days. So you might be wondering, well, wait a minute, you just said it was 365 days for the year, right? That's because they had an additional five days that fall outside of the main part of the calendar, outside of those months. So these are often referred to as intercalculary days or epigominal days. You can use either term. They're both a bit of tongue twisters, but these are an additional five days that basically run between the end of one year and the beginning of another one. And the ancient Egyptians conceptualize these days as the birthdays of five gods. These were the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys. So after these five days, the new year would start with Akhet, the season of Akhet, and it would have four months. And the months in each season are typically numbered. You do get into sort of some names for the months, more often a bit later in Egyptian history. But if we're looking at, say, like the Middle Kingdom and around then, typically they're going with the numbering of them. So you know, you have month one of Akhet, month two of Akhet, and so forth. And then when you get into parrot, same thing: month one, month two, month three, month four. So parrot is the growing season, planting and growing. So this is when the Nile would recede and you'd have this wonderful topsoil left behind from the inundation, from that flood. And this made the land renewed and fertile, so easy to plant, relatively speaking. Still took a lot of labor, of course. And so people would be preparing the soil with hose, with plows, and so forth, laying down the seed, getting it ready, and then it would start to grow. So parrot literally means the emerging or the going out. So this is a reference to the fact that the plants start to grow and come out of the ground, right? So after the four months of parrot, then we would have shemu that we talked about a bit before, this being the harvest season or the low Nile season. So we'd be around the end of that now, just sort of waiting and going through kind of the toughest time of the year in a way, sort of waiting for this to happen and anticipating that Nile flood, hoping it's going to be a good level. Because if it's too low, you can't grow as much food and people go hungry. And if it's too high, then it causes damage to buildings, especially people's houses and so forth. So you didn't necessarily want the highest Nile possible, but you definitely didn't want it to be low either. You wanted it was sort of within a certain bounds. And that's because, you know, while people tend to think of Egypt, of course, as desert because a large part of the territory is desert now, and it was for, you know, most of our people lived near the Nile, they actually lived really close to where the Nile would flood. Because if you think about it, you have to have access to water, right? And where you live. And uh you want to be close to the fields that you're farming. You don't want to be living super far away from that and everything, too. So people would be living like right up by there. And so a higher Nile could also cause a lot of damage and um to their property as well. Now, one of the interesting things about the seasons, though, is that not only do they correspond with the agricultural calendar in terms of what people are actually doing, right, at different times of year in terms of, you know, are they planting things and waiting for it to grow? Are they harvesting, etc.? But the seasons also could dictate what other kind of work was being done. So this shows up in some records. We don't get a lot of texts necessarily that refer clearly to this, but we do get some, including the papyri from a site called Wadi Al-Jarf, which you might have heard of because they describe work done by a team who was working part of the year on building the Great Pyramid of Giza for Hufu. So one of the things that actually Egyptologists sort of assumed, or at least uh maybe assumes not quite the way right word, but we thought likely that they probably transported things like stone a lot during the flood season because it just makes logical sense. When the river is high, that's the time you want to be transporting things downriver, right? And for the most part, if you're building a pyramid at Giza and you're transporting stone, it is gonna come from the south a bit, not necessarily very far south. Some of it comes, actually, most of it, I should point out, actually comes from the Giza Plateau itself. It doesn't even have to travel other than, you know, some number of feet uh from the quarry to the pyramid itself. But for the really specialized stones, a smaller number of specialized stones, so like the fancy outer casing stones that were a nicer limestone, because quite frankly, the limestone at Giza is not that great. Parts of it not even good enough to use for the blocks, parts of it good for building blocks, but they're not pretty, right? So they got some nicer ones for the outer layer from a site called Tura, which is on the east bank, the opposite side of the Nile, and a little bit south. Now, by modern standards, not very far, but in ancient times would not necessarily have been an easy journey, particularly if your boat is weighed down by a lot of stone. So they would have wanted to do this when the river was really high, so you don't run into things, first of all, with your boat, right? You've got a heavy load, your boat's gonna be running real low in the water there. You don't want to be running aground on various rocks and little islands that are sticking out around the area and stuff like that. Second, the current is stronger, right? So this is gonna actually help you get where you're going a lot more easily, uh especially when your boat is weighed down and heavy. So we had for a long time basically surmised that this was likely to be the case, but with the discovery of the Wadial jar of papyri, um, probably close to 15 years now, maybe not quite, but close to 15 years at this point. With that discovery and when the Egyptologists who discovered them started reading them, they did indeed discover that it was actually during the flood season that this particular team who left the papyri behind were transporting stone from Tura to Giza. So this was a wonderful confirmation of something that we thought, you know, made logical sense and seemed likely, but we didn't have really direct evidence for before. And now we do because we have this original documentation that was written by a supervisor named Merer. And he was writing down exactly what his team did every day, two columns of text for each day saying what they did. And so in this season, that's what they were working on, and other seasons they worked at other places. So they also, his team also worked on a port on the Mediterranean, and they also worked at the site of Wadi al-Jarif itself, which is presumably how those papyri ended up there. Wadi al-Jarif is a port along the Red Sea, and it was there for ancient Egyptian teams of miners or quarriers to travel to the Sinai Peninsula where there were copper mines. So during the Old Kingdom, when the Pyramidiza were built, the only metal they were using really for tools was copper at the time. So you needed an awful lot of copper for finishing all of those stones, right? You weren't using the copper tools generally for like the really big brunt work. You would be using harder things like harder stones actually to do that. But when you come to do the finer work, you're going to need, you know, things like bronze, or sorry, I mean copper chisels and um a lot of, you know, you're gonna need a lot of it. And they're gonna need to be reshapen very often because copper is a pretty soft metal. So during Hufu's reign, when he was having his pyramid built, he actually sent two separate expeditions to the Sinai. That was unusual. Typically, a king would only send maybe one, and perhaps not even every reign, and he sent two during his time. So this was obviously a time when they needed a lot of copper, and we can see why, considering the pyramid that he ended up having built there. But um, I'm not gonna go into the full details of pyramid building in this episode, but if that's something you'd like to know more about in terms of the Wadi Al Jar for Pyri and how they relate to pyramid building and how they organize things and what these people were doing, doing in different seasons and so forth, I'd love to hear that. So if you want to let me know, you can reply to one of my emails if you're on my email list, or you can come find me on Instagram at Voices of Ancient Egypt and shoot me a message over there and let me know if that is an episode that you would like to hear. And hopefully we can uh then accommodate you. If uh if a bunch of you say that's what you want to hear, I will put that on the schedule. I love talking about those sorts of things, especially because there's so many misconceptions about it. So it is something I actually teach about in my university courses a lot. It features in a fair number of them because I feel like it's one of the topics that everybody encounters in pop culture. And so it's a it's a great one to learn more deeply about as well. But returning back to the topic of seasons, the ancient Egyptian whole way of life sort of revolved around these changes around the year. And this time in summer, to some extent, even though it was very hot, of course, could be a very exciting time because it's this time of the Nile flooding. And if it floods to a good level, hopefully, you could be excited and knowing that you're going to have a good growing season and harvest and things will be secured essentially for the coming year, and there's this sense of sort of revitalization. And if you take away nothing else from this day, although I hope you take away a lot of wonderful, interesting knowledge about ancient as well, but I would also like you to take away this sense of renewal and excitement for whatever it is that you want to pursue now at this time of year in the summer or if you're in the southern hemisphere or winter. And I wish you all the best with your endeavors. I can't wait to hear what you decide to tackle.