Frequently asked
What is Akhet?
Akhet renders today's date in the ancient Egyptian civil ("wandering") calendar, in real hieroglyphs: a cartouche with your name, a sundial hour-wheel, the season, month and day, and the era year. It is one screen you read by tapping, shared across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision, Apple Watch and widgets, all off a single engine.
What is the "wandering year"?
The Egyptian civil calendar was twelve 30-day months plus five extra days: 365 days, with no leap day. Because it never corrected for the extra quarter-day, it drifted a full turn against the sun over about 1,461 years. Akhet computes exactly where today falls using day-count arithmetic from the Nabonassar epoch, the Censorinus anchor and the Sothic cycle.
How does the cartouche spell my name?
By sound, the way scribes wrote foreign rulers like Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Because the script never wrote vowels and some sounds have no Egyptian sign, the editor asks "how is it said?" where a letter is ambiguous, lets you mark silent letters, and shows a "Read as" transliteration you can hear read aloud. It is honest that the reading is approximate. Nobody knows exactly how it sounded.
What do the seasonal hours mean?
The Egyptians split daylight and darkness into twelve hours each, so an hour stretched long in summer and shrank in winter. Akhet draws that dial from the real sunrise and sunset for your date and place (NOAA/Meeus), with three reckoning modes: local sun, Cairo hours on your clock, and Cairo true. Far north, the hours are gently capped so the wheel never collapses.
What does Pharaoh mode unlock?
All reading and learning is free. Pharaoh mode is a single one-time purchase that unlocks wearing it: the live dial and cartouche as Home- and Lock-Screen widgets and Apple Watch complications, the share-as-image feature, the full month-by-month wandering year, and the "Learn more" references. Open the name editor and tap "Enter Pharaoh mode"; "Restore purchase" brings it back on a new device.
Does it need my location or the internet?
No internet is needed. Everything is computed on your device, so it keeps working for any year. Location is optional and used only to compute your local sunrise and seasonal hours; it stays on your device and is never transmitted. See the privacy policy.