Ancient Egyptian Good Luck Calendar

You might have heard of the Japanese Good Luck Calendar or the Chinese lucky birthday calendar, but did you know there is a good luck calendar that dates back more than 3,200 years?

Ancient Egyptian religious thought placed great importance on auspicious and inauspicious times. Surviving calendars classified days, and sometimes individual portions of a day, as favorable or unfavorable while also recording myths, festivals, warnings, and recommended behavior.

The ancient Egyptians used a 365-day calendar with 12 months. They had three seasons, each with four months. Whereas we have Winter, Summer, Spring, and Fall, the ancient Egyptians had the seasons of growth, harvest, and flood.

As you can see, they were very much like us. However, their calendar didn’t match up with ours. We start our new year in January. But their first month was what we call July.

We know this because Egyptologists were able to calculate and convert the days of the ancient Egyptian year and align them with our modern-day calendar. And the best part is that we can now use their ancient good-luck calendar ourselves!

This calendar was meant to determine whether each day would be good or bad for a certain activity.  The day of the year could be seen as ….

• Favorable
• Mostly favorable
• Very favorable
• Adverse
• Mostly adverse
• Very adverse

This data comes from what we now call the Cairo Calendar, a nineteenth (or early 20th) dynasty Egyptian almanac that lists religious feasts, mythological incidents, favorable or adverse days, forecasts, and warnings.

The Cairo Calendar assigned three good or bad prognoses to each of the three divisions of an Egyptian day. “Very favorable” therefore does not mean that the day was exceptionally lucky. It presumably means that all three portions were marked favorable.

Ancient Egyptian Good Luck Calendar