Ethiopian Calendar Converter

Ethiopia runs its civil life on a calendar no other country uses officially, and the Tewahedo Orthodox Church runs its liturgy on the same one. It counts from the Incarnation, but it takes the date worked out by Annianus of Alexandria in the fifth century rather than the one Dionysius Exiguus produced, which is the reckoning Europe inherited. The two calculations sit seven or eight years apart depending on where you are in the year: seven from the Ethiopian new year in September onward, eight before it. Year 1 of the era opens on 29 August in the year 8, Julian reckoning. The era is Amete Mihret, the Year of Mercy, shortened to E.C.

The shape of the year is the Coptic one: twelve months of exactly thirty days, Meskerem through Nehase, then Pagume to finish, holding five days or six when the year number leaves a remainder of 3 on division by 4. Because the mean year matches the Julian one, the calendar drifts about a day per 133 years against the Gregorian. Enkutatash, the new year, normally falls on 11 September, and on 12 September in the year following an Ethiopian leap year. That is what happened at the celebration people still talk about: the Ethiopian Millennium, 1 Meskerem 2000, arrived on 12 September 2007. Genna, Christmas, is 29 Tahsas, currently 7 January.

The converter works in both directions and does every calculation in UTC, so your machine timezone cannot shift a result by a day. Feed it a Gregorian date and it returns the Ethiopian day, the month transliterated and in Ge'ez script, the weekday, and the matching year in the Amete Alem count from creation, which is simply the same number plus 5500. Feed it an Ethiopian day, month and year and the Gregorian date comes back with its ISO 8601 form. Values come from the browser Intl API and the ICU ethiopic calendar. Two limits worth stating: the page handles dates only, so it will not translate the Ethiopian clock, which starts counting hours at dawn, and it does not compute Fasika or the other movable feasts.