With a little help from that PDF and
www.onlineocr.net I have the two columns:
The earliest Egyptian calendars were based on
lunar observations combined with the annual cycle
of the Nile INUNDATION, measured with
NILOMETERS. On this basis the Egyptians
divided the year into twelve months and three
seasons: akhet (the inundation itself), paret (spring
time, when the crops began to emerge) and shemu
(harvest time). Each season consisted of thirty-
day months, and each month comprised three ten-
day weeks. This was an admirably simple system,
compared with the modern European calendar of
unequal months, and it was briefly revived in
France at the time of the Revolution.
The division of the day and night into twelve
hours each appears to have been initiated by the
Egyptians, probably by simple analogy with the
twelve months of the year, but the division of the
hour into sixty minutes was introduced by the
Babylonians. The smallest unit of time recognised
in ancient Egypt Was the
at, usually translated as
'moment' and having no definite length.
The Egyptian year was considered to begin on 10
July (according to the later Julian calendar), which
was the date of the heliacal rising of the dog star.
Sirius (see ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY
and SOPDET). Surviving textual accounts of the
observation of this event form the linchpin of the
traditional chronology of Egypt. However, even
with the addition of five intercalary ‘epagomenal’
days (corresponding to the birthdays of the deities
Osiris, Isis, Horns, Seth and Nephthys), a
discrepancy gradually developed between the
lunar year of 365 days and the real solar year,
which was about six hours longer. This
effectively meant that the civil year and the
genuine seasonal year were synchronized only
once every 1460 years, although this does not
seem to have been regarded as a fatal flaw until the
Ptolemaic period, when the concept of the 'leap
year' was introduced in the Alexandrian calendar,
later forming the basis for the Julian and
Gregorian calendars.
As well as the civil calendar there were also
separate religious calendars consisting of
FESTIVALS and ceremonies associated with
particular deities and temples (e.g. the Feast of
Opet at Thebes, celebrated in the second month of
akhet).
There was a copying error in the screen used text which I have replicated, where ‘Each season consisted of four thirty-day month’ became ‘Each season consisted of thirty-day months’. They also didn't include the last sentence from the book's 'Calendar' entry which talked a little about the priests adjusting the calendars.
Now it just needs formatting into a couple of columns with all the right spacing in the right font.