Our Glorious History, Part IV

La quatrième partie d'une série de longueur indéterminée.

<grisom> Umu! More hellworms!
I know how to convert between the Gregorian and Coptic calendars, but I also know that the Coptic calendar has drifted rather far from the year-start originally intended by the Ancient Egyptians. When did the Egyptian calendar start *when it was invented*?

<umunmutamku> PRELIMINARY WIKIPEDIAING (i am at school and write hastily from a business-bldg computer) seems to indicate the year started with the heliacal rising (?) of the star Sirius.

<grisom> I know!

Supposedly the "heliacal rising" was an astronomical proxy for a certain point in the Nile's flood cycle, which presumably occurs on a specific date in our current calendar. The original Egyptian calendar was exactly 365 days every year, so it got badly out of sync with the Nile by the time it was Romanized into the Coptic calendar. The Coptic calendar itself, with its Julian leap years, has gone even further out of whack since then. So what I want to know, put more precisely, is: If the Coptic calendar were still in sync with the Nile, on what Gregorian date would the Coptic year begin?

(My purpose in all this is to figure out how to line up the Coptic and French Republican month names, of course.)

<grisom> July 20th! Okay, actually that's a Julian date, but it probably doesn't matter too much. This would mean we are currently in Nivose-Meshir.