Wait, it's 2018?
The Ethiopian calendar, which is still in use today, has thirteen months, begins in September, and right now it is 2018
There are many people, especially those who have underage children, who follow the school calendar rather than the regular one, and for them in many European countries, the year begins with the start of the school term in the first half of September. In that sense, it is curious that they coincide with the Ge’ez, that is, the civil calendar used by Christians in Ethiopia, which starts on September 11 or 12 in the Gregorian calendar and comes from the Coptic. It also differs from ours in that it consists of twelve months of thirty days plus a thirteenth with another five or six epagomenal days.
In Amharic—the official language of central and northern Ethiopia—it is called yä’Ityoṗṗya zämän aḳoṭaṭär, but it is better known as Ge’ez, in reference to the Semitic language spoken in the ancient Kingdom of Aksum (1st–6th centuries AD). Although Ge’ez fell out of popular use, it survived in the court, administration, and literature, and was also employed as a lingua franca among the different ethnic groups of the country. Modern Tigrinya (the most spoken language in Eritrea) and Tigre derive from Ge’ez; Amharic does not, although it is related.
What concerns us here is that Ge’ez is also used in the liturgical celebrations of several churches in the region, such as the Ethiopian Orthodox, Ethiopian Catholic, Eritrean Orthodox, Eritrean Catholic, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Eritrea, and even the Beta Israel Jewish community, serving the same role as Latin in the West. These religions have another thing in common: the use of the homonymous calendar, not official but customary because it is civil in nature despite being, like the Gregorian, faith-based.
It is a solar calendar very similar to that of the Coptic churches of Alexandria, both Catholic and Orthodox, since it is based on the traditional Coptic, which in turn originates from Pharaonic Egypt, where, according to the Pyramid Texts, the year was divided into 12 months of 30 days each plus five epagomenal days added at the end of the last month to complete the 365-day solar cycle. The Egyptians had two other calendars, lunar and of ephemerides, that played a secondary role because they were not suitable for calculating the annual Nile floods and the resulting agricultural seasons.
The Julian calendar, so called because it was promoted by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, improved it by adding a leap day to February every four years, making its average year 365.25 days. This causes an excess of eleven minutes and fourteen seconds per year (or one day every 128 years), which is why in 1583 Pope Gregory XIII ordered its reform. Thus, to correct the mismatch, he removed ten days from 1582 so that Thursday, October 4, was followed by Friday, October 15 of the same month, introducing the leap year as well.
The result is much more precise: in the Gregorian calendar the lag is one day every 3,324 years, although many countries—especially Protestant and Orthodox—were reluctant to adopt it, and some did not do so until well into the 20th century, such as Greece, Romania, Turkey, or Russia. As for Ethiopia, its geographical location and its cultural and religious traditions kept it away from the Western world, and that is why it preserved the Ge’ez calendar, a reflection of the Coptic.
Like it, it is divided into 12 months of 30 days each plus the five mentioned epagomenal days that form a small thirteenth month. The sixth epagomenal day is added every four years on August 29 (Julian calendar), so for Ethiopians the year usually begins on September 11 of the Gregorian calendar, but it can be the 12th if it is the year before a Gregorian leap year, as will happen until 2099.
It should be noted that the leap year of the Ethiopian calendar repeats every four years without exception, while Gregorian centennial years are only leap years when they are exactly divisible by 400. Therefore, a set of corresponding dates will apply more frequently to a single century; since the Gregorian year 2000 is a leap year, the current correspondence spans two centuries.
The four-year leap cycle is associated with the four evangelists. The first year after an Ethiopian leap year is called the Year of John (Kudus Yohannes), followed by the Year of Matthew and the Year of Mark. The year in which there is a sixth epagomenal day corresponds to the Year of Luke. A leap year has six days in the thirteenth month, called Pagumen, and occurs every four years without exception. If it is not a leap year, then Pagumen only has five days.
In Amharic, New Year is called Enkutatash (Gift of Jewels), while in Ge’ez it is Ri’se Awde Amets. Enkutatash is celebrated on our August 20 or 30 with the festival of El-Nayrouz, which includes songs, dances, and good wishes for others, who are presented with flowers; obviously, there are also religious rites. It is the date that marks the end of the rainy season, although tradition says it commemorates the return of the Queen of Sheba to Ethiopia after visiting King Solomon in Jerusalem.
The first month is called Meskerem in Amharic (Thout in Coptic) and, as we said, its start coincides with September 11 Gregorian; the others are Taqemt (October 11), Hadar (November 10), Tahsas (December 10), Taerr (January 9), Yakatit (February 8), Magabit (March 10), Miyazya (April 9), Genbo (May 9), Sane (June 8), Hamle (July 8), Nahase (August 7) and the aforementioned Pagumen (September 6). In the case of a leap year, from September to February it will be one day later.
As for the era they use, it is not the Anno Domini (Year of the Lord, which takes the birth of Jesus as a reference, the famous BC and AD), established by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century and which has no year zero because the Romans did not count it. Ethiopians use the Era of the Incarnation, which, as its name indicates, is based on the Annunciation to Mary. It was March 25, 9 BC, according to the calculations made in the 5th century by another monk, Annianus of Alexandria; that is, eight years after the date estimated by Dionysius, which is why in the Ethiopian calendar it is now 2018.
However, the Era of the Incarnation is not the only counting system that existed in Ethiopia. They also used others such as the Era of the Martyrs, also called the Diocletian Era in reference to the Christian persecutions carried out by Diocletian. This method, which is still used by the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt and has a difference of three and a half or four months in its New Year compared to the Gregorian calendar, places the first year on August 29, 284 because that was the year the emperor’s reign began.
The mentioned Dionysius Exiguus added 15 Metonic cycles (periods of nine years in which the moon phases repeat almost exactly in the same annual period) to form a lunisolar calendar. Before, in the Era of the Martyrs, there were 13 of these cycles, so the total calculation would be expressed as follows: 15 × 19 + 13 × 19 = 532. This last resulting figure constitutes a complete medieval paschal cycle, whose first cycle ended in the year 247 of the Era of the Martyrs (= 13×19). Furthermore, 532 is the product of the 19-year Metonic cycle and the 28-year solar cycle.
Likewise, the Anno Mundi (Year of the World) was also used, valid until the late 19th century and which counted from the Creation. The Hebrew tradition, based on the Seder Olam Rabbah by Yose Ben Halafta (a 2nd-century rabbi), calculates it in 3761 BC. It was adopted by the first Christians, who changed the Creation date because new proposals arose for it (3952 BC according to Bede the Venerable, 5184 BC according to the Annals of the Four Irish Masters, 4004 BC according to the Anglican Archbishop James Ussher, etc.).
The Byzantine calendar was a derivation of the Julian established by Constantine I in 312 AD and differed only in the start date of the year (September 1 or Cabudanni) and its numbering. The latter also began with the Creation, so it was similar to the Anno Mundi (Etos Kosmou in Greek), although two authors proposed different dates for it.
The first was Panodorus of Alexandria, an Egyptian monk and historian who in 412 AD calculated that 5,904 years had passed since the appearance of Adam. This era, also known as Alexandrian and Antiochene, began on August 29, 360 AD, that is, 4 × 19 years after the Era of the Martyrs, and was widely used by Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Eritrean chronologists.
The second, the aforementioned Annianus of Alexandria, criticized Panodorus for relying too heavily on secular rather than biblical sources, so he developed his own chronology for the Creation; it was, he claimed, March 25, 5492 BC, and he set the first day of the year on August 29. This seminal year had 11 paschal cycles of 532 years each before the Alexandrian year, which began on August 29, 360 and which, in turn, was four 19-year cycles after the Diocletian Era, which we have already seen began on August 29, 284.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on April 21, 2026: El calendario etíope, que sigue vigente en la actualidad, tiene trece meses, empieza en septiembre, y ahora mismo es 2018
SOURCES
Nachum Deshorwitz, Edward M. Reingold, Calendrical calculations
Yohannes K. Mekonnen, Ethiopia: The land, its people, history and culture
Solomon Addis Getahun, Wudu Taf
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