Akhet: Egyptian Calendar

Akhet shows you today's date the way an Egyptian scribe would have written it, in real hieroglyphs, on the ancient civil calendar that drifted a whole turn against the sun. It is one dial you read by tapping. No menus, no clutter. A sundial tells the seasonal hour, your name sits in a cartouche at the top, the month and day read as three ruled columns, and the era year runs along the bottom. Tap anything and it explains itself. THE WANDERING YEAR Twelve months of thirty days across three seasons, Inundation, Emergence and Harvest, plus five days added at the year's end. Because the priesthood kept the sacred 365-day year and never adopted a leap day, the calendar slips against the sun by design, a full turn every 1461 years. Akhet computes exactly where in that turn today falls. THE SEASONAL HOURS The Egyptians split daylight into twelve hours and the night into twelve, so an hour stretched in summer and shrank in winter. Akhet's sundial mirrors the real sun where you stand: noon at the top, midnight at the bottom, the day arc widening through the year, a shadow marking the hour you are in. Sunrise and sunset are computed on your device, no server, no account. YOUR NAME IN A CARTOUCHE Write your name and Akhet spells it by sound, exactly as scribes wrote foreign rulers into cartouches. Where a letter can be voiced more than one way, you choose; silent letters can be dropped; and you can hear the reconstruction read aloud. Tap the famous royal names and Akhet shows how the monuments actually wrote them, the very spellings that let Champollion crack the script. LEARN AS DEEPLY AS YOU LIKE A source-critical reference to the whole system: the 24 sound-signs, how one sign can be a sound, a whole word, or a silent meaning-marker, the additive numerals, how to count in Egyptian with the number-words that still survive into Coptic, and an honest account of what is attested and what is only reconstructed. Everything is hedged where the record is uncertain, and cited to public scholarship. WEAR IT, PHARAOH MODE A single one-time purchase puts the living dial and your cartouche on the Home Screen and Lock Screen, and on the Apple Watch: a sundial hour complication, a wheel of the whole year, the date, and your name. Pharaoh mode also opens the full month-by-month library. Ask Siri "what's today in Akhet" and hear the reading spoken. Free to read today and to learn. No subscription, no account, no tracking, everything is computed on your device.