The Ethiopian calendar — and why your computer is seven years behind

<p>Walk into a café in Addis Ababa and ask the barista what year it is and they will say, depending on the season, 2018 or 2019. Your phone will disagree. The phone is using the Gregorian calendar, promulgated in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a refinement of Julius Caesar&#x27;s earlier reform. The Ethiopian calendar is an older system that never accepted the Gregorian correction.</p> <p>The base is the Coptic calendar, itself derived from the ancient Egyptian civil calendar. Twelve months of 30 days plus a 13th month — *Pagume* — of 5 or 6 days depending on the leap year. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church locates the birth of Christ approximately seven to eight years later than the Western Anno Domini reckoning, following a different exegetical tradition rooted in Annianus of Alexandria. The result is a stable offset: Ethiopian year *n* corresponds to Gregorian year *n + 7* or *n + 8* depending on the month.</p> <p>Beyond the offset, the structure is distinctive. New Year — *Enkutatash* — falls on what the Gregorian calendar calls 11 September (12 September in leap years). This is roughly when the rains end on the Ethiopian highlands and the meskel daisies bloom. The calendar is, in other words, agriculturally and ecologically tuned to the high-altitude Ethiopian year, not to the agricultural cycle of the Italian peninsula. It is a different — and for its location, more accurate — division of the solar year.</p> <p>Ethiopia is not unique in this regard. The Berber agricultural calendar still in use in Morocco and Algeria runs on the Julian reckoning. The Islamic Hijri calendar is lunar. The Zoroastrian Yazdegerdi calendar is solar but unleaped. What makes the Ethiopian case useful is that it survived continuously in administrative use — court documents, church records, ledgers — through the colonial period, when most pre-existing African time-reckoning systems were swept aside by colonial bureaucracies.</p> <p>What does this mean practically? It means a Westerner who plans a meeting with an Ethiopian counterpart needs to be careful about month names. *Tahsas* (Coptic *Choiak*) overlaps with Gregorian December and January. The Ethiopian eve of the new millennium — *Enkutatash* of 1993 E.C. — fell on what the rest of the world called 11 September 2000. There were fireworks. The world was looking elsewhere.</p>