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The ‘Lychnapsia Philocaliana’ and the Birthday of Isis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
So far as I am aware, no classical scholar has devoted much attention to the interpretation of a lamp-festival assigned to the 12th August in the calendar of Philocalus. Mommsen, Wissowa, Wilcken, Nilsson and Cumont have made some reference to it, but none of them has attempted to identify it with any of the numerous lamp-festivals of Egypt. And so this feast, though suspected by almost all scholars to be an Isiac ceremony, has remained a mystery. The only Egyptologist who tried to solve the riddle, and who all but succeeded, is Brugsch Bey. The fundamental theory of Brugsch is sound, namely that the ‘Lychnapsia Philocaliana’ should be linked with the most important festival of lamps in Egypt, which began with the five epagomenal days added at the end of Mesore, the twelfth and last month of the Egyptian calendar, in order to harmonise with the solar year a calendar of 360 days divided into twelve equal parts. But the question is with what particular rite in this festive period the ‘Lychnapsia Philocaliana’ should be linked.
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- Copyright ©M. S. Salem 1937. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
1 CIL i2, p. 270.
2 Ibid., p. 324.
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12 Prince Omar Toussoun, Mém. sur l'Hist. du Nil, i (= Mém. Institut d'Égypte, viii), 238 ff.
13 CIL, i2, p. 333 f. Mommsen's theory still holds the field as the most satisfactory explanation which has yet been advanced to account for the celebration of the ‘Isia’ on the 28th October–3rd November, dates which do not seem to have been borrowed from the Alexandrian calendar, in which the I7th–19th Athyr would correspond with the 13th–15th November. The only serious challenge to Mommsen's view has come from the pen of Weill, a notable champion of the Sothic theory. Weill, , Étude d' Égyptologie; bases, méthodes et résults de la chronologie égyptienne, i, 138 ff.Google Scholar, belives that the ‘Isia’ marked in the ‘Fasti Philocali’ should be linked with the feast of Osiris-Sokaris in the month of Choiak, and not with the Osiris-Isis festival in the month of Athyr. He thinks that, when the Alexandrian reform was adopted, the dates of the feasts were shifted back, or rather transcribed, into the Alexandrian calendar in accordance with their nominal distance from the rise of Sirius, which was put in the new calendar on the 25th Epeiph. By comparing the Sothic and Julian calendars he found that the 12th Choiak (Sothic), the commencement of the Osiris-Sokaris rites, corresponds with the 28th October (Julian), the first day in the ‘Isia Philocaliana.’ He concluded therefore that the ‘Isia Philocaliana’ were the preliminary rites in the Osiris-Sokaris feast. The weak point in Weill's argument is not hard to seek: he overlooked a very important piece of information given in the ‘Fasti Philocali.’ This calendar puts the ‘Hilaria’ on the 3rd November, a rite which is certainly an integral part of the ‘Isia’ (cf. Lydus, , de mens. iv, 148Google Scholar), but which cannot be interpreted by Weill's theory.
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