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How did Ancient Humans Commemorate the New Year?

Ancient Egyptians celebrated New Years Day long before we did

Fareeha Arshad
Lessons from History
3 min readDec 31, 2024

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The Temple of Debod provides the best view during New Year’s Eve fireworks in Madrid. Credits: Willian Justen de Vasconcellos/Unsplash

1. New Years in Ancient Egypt

Celebrating a new year is not a recent development. New Year celebrations have been around for a long time — as long as 5000 years ago, during the Bronze Age in Ancient Egypt.

They had a celebration known as the Wepet Renpet, during which the Ancient Egyptians celebrated their transition into a new year with lots of food and alcohol. Coincidently, this festival was celebrated around the same time as the flooding of the Nile River each year. They possibly celebrated the flooding as the New Year because of more fertile lands and, hence, more agricultural produce for the people in Ancient Egypt.

2. New Year in Babylon

Present-day Akitu celebration | Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The people of Ancient Babylon (present-day Iraq) were the first to make New Year's Resolutions as we do now. They started celebrating New Year as early as 4000 years ago and marked the start of the year in March instead—at the time of planting their new crops. This celebration used to be prolonged, with a duration of…

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Lessons from History
Lessons from History

Published in Lessons from History

Lessons from History is a platform for writers who share ideas and inspirational stories from world history. The objective is to promote history on Medium and demonstrate the value of historical writing.

Fareeha Arshad
Fareeha Arshad

Written by Fareeha Arshad

Avid reader. Ardent dreamer. Amateur writer.

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