About Shanati

A Quick Rundown

Shanati’s goal is to reconstruct the ancient Babylonian Calendar and bring it into harmony with the proleptic, or backward counting, Julian Calendar. This will be achieved by compiling and integrating all known relevant cuneiform and other textual data and properly aligning that data with a state-of-the-art astronomical model of first lunar visibility. Shanati’s reconstructed daily ancient Babylonian Calendar will become the new international standard for pre-Julian, recorded Western calendrical time. By setting these two calendars on one synchronized timeline, the ancient world becomes temporally connected with the modern world. This will assist in bridging the wide gulf between perceptions of our modern world and of the ancient Old World. Shanati’s results will offer unprecedented daily precision in 1st millennium BCE chronology, opening new vistas for research. The project’s results will be offered in a forthcoming volume and in this website, which offers Shanati's results as a service and will have automated extensibility as texts are added after the completion of the two-year project.

Meet Our Team

Core Team

Alexander Jones
Principal Investigator
Director Institute for the Study of the Ancient World New York University
David Danzig
Creator and Lead Researcher
Researcher Institute for the Study of the Ancient World New York University
Joshua Jeffers
Assyriology Researcher
Lecturer Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations University of Pennsylvania

Consultants

Victor Temprano Website & Database Development/Design Consultant Mapster Inc
Henrik Roschier Astronomy Researcher PhD Candidate Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Advisory Board

John Steele
Lead Babylonian Astronomy Advisor
Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity Department of Egyptology and Assyriology Brown University
Tom Elliott
Lead Digital Advisor
Associate Director for Digital Programs and Senior Research Scholar Institute for the Study of the Ancient World New York University
Michael Jursa
Professor of Assyriology University of Vienna
Christopher B. F. Walker
Retired Deputy Keeper Department of the Middle East Antiquities British Museum
Hermann Hunger
Associate Professor Emeritus University of Vienna
Teije de Jong
Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy University of Amsterdam
Mathieu Ossendrijver
Senior Fellow Einstein Center Chronoi Free University of Berlin
Heather D. Baker
Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History University of Toronto
Johannes Hackl
University Assistant Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies University of Leipzig
M. Willis Monroe
Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies University of British Columbia
Shanati has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Web resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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