Ethiopian calendar today

Why the Ethiopian calendar is 7 or 8 years behind

The months are not the reason. The gap comes from the year count. Both calendars number years from the Incarnation, but they disagree on when it happened.

In the early 400s, an Alexandrian monk named Annianus built a chronology of world history in which the Annunciation, and so the start of the Christian era, fell on March 25 of the year we now call 9 AD. The Church of Alexandria, and the Ethiopian Church that took its calendar from Alexandria, adopted this "Year of Mercy" (Amete Mihret) count. In 525, the Roman monk Dionysius Exiguus drew up Easter tables with a different count, Anno Domini, that put the Incarnation about seven or eight years earlier. Western Europe adopted Dionysius, and his count became the AD years used worldwide today. Ethiopia kept Annianus.

So the Ethiopian year 2019 began on September 11, 2026. Because it begins in September, the gap is 7 years from Enkutatash to the end of December and 8 years from January to early September. Ethiopia also has an older world era, Amete Alem, that counts 5,500 years from creation to the Incarnation, so 2019 E.C. is 7519 Amete Alem. Neither the Ethiopian nor the Western count is "correct": modern historians place the birth of Jesus around 6 to 4 BC, before both.

The four evangelists and the leap year

Each year is dedicated in turn to an evangelist: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. 2019 is the Year of Luke. The Year of Luke is the leap year, with a 6th day of Pagume, falling just before a Gregorian leap year. That is why Enkutatash moves from September 11 to September 12 the following year: in 2020 it is on September 12, 2027.

The sky behind the Ethiopian calendar

From the Nile and the Dog Star

The Ethiopian calendar is the Alexandrian (Coptic) calendar of Egypt, and that grew out of the ancient Egyptian civil calendar, one of the oldest calendars in the world: 12 months of 30 days plus 5 extra "days upon the year", exactly the shape of Meskerem to Nehase plus Pagume. (Pagume comes from the Greek epagomenai, the added days.)

The Egyptian year was tied in origin to two events. One was the Nile flood, which reached Egypt in summer. The other was the heliacal rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which the Egyptians called Sopdet (Sothis in Greek): the first morning each year that Sirius could be seen low in the east just before sunrise, after about two months hidden in the Sun's glare. Egyptian texts call this "the going up of Sopdet" and link it with the New Year and the coming of the flood. Many historians think the civil calendar was set up when the two coincided, but how and when it began is still debated, so treat that part as a likely story, not settled fact.

Today, from Memphis near Cairo, Sirius first appears before dawn around August 2 (a rough estimate, with the Sun 8 degrees below the horizon as Sirius rises). In Roman times it came in late July by the Julian calendar; the slow wobble of the Earth's axis (precession) and the 13-day gap between the Julian and Gregorian calendars have both moved it since.

A year without a leap day, and the Sothic cycle

The Egyptian civil year had 365 days and no leap day, so it slid a quarter of a day per year against the seasons and against Sirius: one day every four years, a whole month in about 120 years. New Year's Day came back to the rising of Sirius only once every 1,460 years, a period later called the Sothic cycle. The Roman writer Censorinus recorded that the Egyptian New Year coincided with the rising of Sirius in 139 AD, one of the anchor dates of Egyptian chronology. In 238 BC, Ptolemy III tried to add a leap day in the Canopus Decree, but it did not last. After Rome took Egypt, the reform of Augustus in the 20s BC tied the calendar to the Julian year with a 6th extra day every fourth year. That fixed Alexandrian calendar is the one that passed to the Coptic Church and to Ethiopia, and its New Year, 1 Thoth, became Meskerem 1: August 29 in the Julian calendar, which is September 11 in ours.

So Enkutatash is no longer set by Sirius. It falls at the end of Ethiopia's long rains (Kiremt), when the yellow Meskel daisies (adey abeba) bloom, a seasonal new year of its own. But on Enkutatash morning, Sirius still rules the pre-dawn sky over Ethiopia: in Addis Ababa it rises around 2 AM and stands more than 50 degrees up by sunrise.

At that moment in New York, Sirius is 21° up in the south-east. It rose at 3:14 AM and the Sun rises at 6:33 AM. Seen from Addis Ababa, closer to the equator, Sirius climbs higher still. The SkyView follows your location, so you see Sirius the way it would look from your own sky on that morning.

A clock set by the Sun

Ethiopian time is the other place where the sky shows through. Counting hours from sunrise only works where sunrise hardly moves, and Ethiopia, between 3 and 15 degrees north, is such a place. In Addis Ababa the Sun rises between about 6:04 AM and 6:46 AM on every day of the year, so 12 o'clock Ethiopian time is always close to dawn.

Fasika and the Easter full moon

Easter is a moon festival in disguise. The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) set it on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, March 21, using tables worked out in Alexandria. The Ethiopian Church still computes it this way, with a traditional reckoning called Bahire Hasab ("the sea of computation"), and keeps the Julian calendar's equinox and moon tables. That gives the same date as the Eastern Orthodox churches: in 2027 Fasika is on Sunday, May 2, 2027, while Western Easter is on March 28, 2027.

The old tables have drifted from the real sky. The Julian March 21 is now April 3 on our calendar, about two weeks after the true equinox, and the tables' full moon in 2027 falls on April 25, 2027, while the real full moon after the equinox is on Mon, Mar 22, 6:44 AM. That is why Fasika is often one or five weeks later than Western Easter, sometimes on the same day, and never earlier. Fasika ends Hudade, the 55-day Lenten fast, and the Easter vigil goes on through the night into the early hours of Sunday morning.

The other holidays

Meskel (Meskerem 17) recalls the finding of the True Cross by Empress Helena in the 4th century; by legend, the smoke of her bonfire showed her where to dig, so on the eve, Demera, huge bonfires topped with crosses are lit across the country, and the way the pole falls is read as a sign for the year ahead. Genna is Christmas, celebrated after a 43-day fast with a night-long service and, traditionally, a hockey-like game also called genna. Timkat, the Epiphany, re-enacts the baptism of Christ: the tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, is carried in procession to water on the eve (Ketera) and the water is blessed at dawn. Meskel and Timkat are both on UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Related: Hebrew date today · Moon phase today · Next full moon · Wheel of the Year