Here are papers deriving from a session of the Seventh Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop held at the University of Notre Dame in 2005. The purpose of the session was to test current assumptions in our modern understanding of early chronology and time-keeping, particularly the chronology and time-keeping of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The editor has produced a fine-looking and commendably copy-edited volume but has not attempted any synthesis of the papers that might sum up their joint achievement.

The first two papers are on Egyptian time-keeping. Sarah Symons takes a new look at the “star tables” painted on the lids of coffins of the first intermediate period and the Middle Kingdom and their relationship to the 365-day year of the civil calendar (A star's year: the annual cycle in the ancient Egyptian sky, pp. 1–33). The paper is highly technical; it challenges the assumption of earlier scholars that the decan lists derived from the tables represent a “chronology of observations”. Leo Depuydt asserts in inimitable style the essential correctness of the reconstructed chronology of Egypt and its neighbours in the late second and early first millennia bc (Calendars and years in ancient Egypt: the soundness of Egyptian and west Asian chronology in 1500–500 bc and the consistency of the Egyptian 365-day wandering year, pp. 35–81). His article is an absorbing study of the foundations of the currently accepted chronology and a history of how it came to be reconstructed. It includes a detailed rebuttal of the revisionist model of chronology put forward by Peter James and others in 1991.

Four papers are given over to Mesopotamian time-keeping. Lis Brack-Bernsen presents evidence for the existence in Mesopotamia of a 360-day “administrative calendar”, alongside the civil lunisolar calendar, for nearly two-and-a-half millennia from about 2600 bc (The 360-day year in Mesopotamia, pp. 83–100). The 360-day year was a practical scheme to aid bureaucrats in calculating the supply of and demand for commodities and labour in a centralized economy. Perhaps it is better not to think of it as a “calendar” at all, but as a conventional tool for reckoning time in the future. Wayne Horowitz draws attention to the physical format of the Middle Assyrian cuneiform tablet known as Astrolabe B, a combination of menology and star lists in which the god Marduk's pivotal position at the tablet's centre asserts his supremacy in the cosmos (The astrolabes: astronomy, theology, and chronology, pp. 101–13). This was a theology most explicitly propounded in Enūma elish, the Babylonian creation epic, and Horowitz finds the astrolabe's date, c. 1100 bc, circumstantial confirmation of the rise of the theology of Marduk's divine sovereignty in this period. Certainly the Marduk theology could not have arisen any later.

John P. Britton discusses ancient Mesopotamian time-keeping diachronically, charting the ever greater precision of the Babylonian calendar, especially in intercalation, that is clearly visible in first-millennium sources from the Neo-Assyrian period to the Seleucid era (Calendars, intercalations and year-lengths in Mesopotamian astronomy, pp. 115–32). John M. Steele concentrates on the length of the Babylonian month in the same period, and shows how empirical observation was eventually superseded by reliable prediction based on a very exact astronomical understanding of the lunar cycle (The length of the month in Mesopotamian calendars of the first millennium bc, pp. 133–48).

An additional paper by Alexander Jones describes astronomical calendars devised by Greek and Hellenistic scholars (On Greek stellar and zodiacal date-reckoning, pp. 149–67). It and most of the papers that precede it confirm the emphasis, conveyed also by the name of the workshop that hosted them and by the book's subtitle, on the calendar as a phenomenon in the history of science in general, and of astronomy in particular. Ancient Near Eastern calendars were also socio-economic, political and intellectual instruments, but for these aspects of them the reader must look elsewhere.