Movable wAgj and Numeration of Lunar days in Ancient Egypt
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Abstract
The ancient Egyptians celebrated the wAgj feast, an integral part of the Osirian cult. Data from the Illahun archive evidence that there were two instances of it: a fixed one, which fell on a specific civil date, and a movable one associated with a specific phase of the moon. There is disagreement about the lunar day and month on which the movable feast took place. The aggregation of the Illahun lunar dates into a ‘date net’ indicates that the disagreement is due both to peculiarities of the datasets of previous studies and to the incorrect numeration of lunar days in Parker’s list, which has been the standard for more than 70 years. Analysis of the lists of lunar days from the Ptolemaic Period also reveals the erroneous position of one of the days; when it is set to the proper position, the symmetry of the phases relative to the day of full moon improves. Based on the corrected numeration of lunar days, it is concluded that the movable wAgj in the original list fell on the 17th day of the second month after the emergence of Sopdet (the heliacal rising of Sirius in modern terms). Further research is needed to examine the effect of the proposed correction on the chronology of the Middle Kingdom.
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movable wAgj feast, wAgj dates, lunar month, lunar days numeration, moon, phases, Sirius, heliacal rising
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