section_path: Other calendars/The Qumran calendar
section_name: The Qumran calendar
paragraph_text: The Qumran calendar
  
  Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls have references to a unique calendar, used by the people there, who are often assumed to have been Essenes. The year of this calendar used the ideal Mesopotamian calendar of twelve 30-day months, to which were added 4 days at the equinoxes and solstices (cardinal points), making a total of 364 days.
  
  With only 364 days, the calendar would be very noticeably different from the actual seasons after a few years, but there is nothing to indicate what was done about this problem. Various scholars have suggested that nothing was done and the calendar was allowed to change with respect to the seasons, or that changes were made irregularly when the seasonal anomaly was too great to be ignored any longer.