crop gathered or stored without a festival
to implore the blessing of the gods, would have been an act of sacrilege
and fraught with disaster. The first year of three hundred and sixty
days, regulated by the revolutions of the moon, did not long meet the
needs of the Egyptian people; it did not correspond with the length of
the solar year, for it fell short of it by five and a quarter days, and
this deficit, accumulating from twelvemonth to twelvemonth, caused such
a serious difference between the calendar reckoning and the natural
seasons, that it soon had to be corrected. They intercalated, therefore,
after the twelfth month of each year and before the first day of the
ensuing year, five epagomenal days, which they termed the "five days
over and above the year."[*]

* There appears to be a tendency among Egyptologists now to
doubt the existence, under the Ancient Empire, of the five
epagomenal days, and as a fact they are nowhere to be found
expressly mentioned; but we know that the five gods of the
Osirian cycle were born during the epagomenal day (cf. p.
247 of this History), and the allusions to the Osirian
legend which are met with in the Pyramid texts, prove that
the days were added long before the time when those
inscriptions were cut. As the wording of the texts often
comes down from prehistoric times, it is most likely that
the invention of the epagomenal days is anterior to the
first Thinite and Memphite dynasties.

The legend of Osiris relates that Thot created them in order to permit
Nuit to give birth to all her children. These days constituted, at the
end of the "great year," a "little month," which considerably lessened
the difference between the solar and lunar computation, but did not
entirely do away with it, and the six hours and a few minutes of which
the Egyptians had not taken count gradually became the source of fresh
perplexities. They at length amounted to a whole day, which needed to
be added every four years to the regular three hundred and sixty days,
a fact which was unfortunately overlooked. The difficulty, at first only
slight, which this caused in public life, increased with time, and ended
by disturbing the harmony between the order of the calendar and that of
natural phenomena: at the end of a hundred and twenty years, the legal
year had gained a whole month on the actual year, and the 1st of Thot
anticipated the heliacal ri