Shanati: Reconstructing the Daily Ancient Babylonian Chronology in Synchronization with the Proleptic Julian Calendar

FAIN: HAA-269004-20

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Alexander Raymond Jones (Project Director: June 2019 to present)

A reconstruction of ancient chronology combining textual and astronomical data that will allow scholars to identify when past events took place with greater precision.

The goal of this project is to reconstruct the Babylonian Chronology of the 1st millennium BCE, the ancient old world's foremost calendar, with daily granularity on the basis of cuneiform economic and scholarly textual evidence, in consonance with a retrojective astronomical model of first moon visibility. The basic results will be presented in terms of the proleptic Julian Calendar. The project will gather the textual data from scholarly databases and publications, integrate them in a custom database and present its results through a high-end website, with embeddable widget and API access, as well as via print publication. The project targets the scholarly, lay, and undergraduate and high school educational audiences.