Afghan month names: Hamal to Hut, and their Iranian equivalents

Your document says Hamal, or Sawr, or Mizan. You search for a Persian month list and none of those names are on it. Nothing is wrong with the document, and nothing is wrong with the list, they are two naming systems for the same twelve months.

The twelve months, in all three naming systems

Month numbers and day counts are shared. Only column three onward changes.

Six months of 31 days, five of 30, then a short one that stretches by a day in leap years. That is the Iranian calendar exactly, which is why the Persian months reference works for an Afghan date once you have translated the name.

The zodiac link is the memory aid. Hamal is the ram, Aries. Asad is the lion, Leo. Read down the zodiac column and the Afghan names stop being arbitrary.

The spelling on your document may not match this table

This is where most lookups fail. The Dari names are Arabic words written in Perso-Arabic script, and there is no single agreed Latin spelling, so published sources disagree:

• ثور appears as Sawr, Saur, Sowr and Thawr
• حوت appears as Hut and Hoot
• میزان appears as Mizan, Mīzān and Mizaan
• سنبله appears as Sunbula and Sonbula
• جدی appears as Jadi and Jadī

Pashto varies more, because the scholarly transliteration uses diacritics that ordinary typing drops: غبرګولی is written Ǧbargolai in reference works and Ghbarghole or ghabarguli elsewhere.

The lookup above accepts all of these. It folds away accents and case, so Mīzān, Mizan and MIZAAN all resolve to month 7.

Why “add 621” breaks on the last three months

There is a widely repeated shortcut for Afghan dates: add 621 years, and about three months, to get the Gregorian equivalent. It is right most of the year and then quietly fails.

The problem is that a solar year starts at Nowruz in late March, so it straddles two Gregorian years. Months 1 to 9, Hamal through Qaws, fall inside one Gregorian year. Months 10, 11 and 12 — Jadi, Dalwa and Hut — fall after 1 January, in the next one.

Checked across solar years 1380 to 1410, the +621 rule returns the wrong Gregorian year for 2,448 of 11,322 days, about 21.6%. Every one of those failures sits in Jadi, Dalwa or Hut. A worked case:

• 25 Mizan 1385 → 17 October 2006. The shortcut says 2006. Correct.
• 15 Jadi 1405 → 5 January 2027. The shortcut says 2026. Wrong by a year.

For a birth date on a tazkira, that is a one-year error in an official record, and it lands specifically on winter birthdays. Convert the date rather than shifting it. The same trap in its Iranian form is covered in common conversion mistakes.

Nowruz is not always 21 March either

The other half of the shortcut, “the year starts 21 March”, is also approximate. The solar new year tracks the spring equinox, so it moves:

Three of those six years do not begin on 21 March. Why it drifts is worked through in Nowruz and the Gregorian drift.

Dates you may recognise, in both systems

The Saur Revolution is named after month 2, which is the clearest illustration that these names sit in ordinary historical use, not just on paperwork.

A note on official status

Worth being precise, because sources are not. Afghanistan’s 2004 Constitution, Article 18, provided that the country’s calendar year is based on the Hijra and that “the basis for state offices shall be the solar calendar”, and it named Fridays together with 28 Asad and 8 Saur as public holidays.

What happened after August 2021 is not settled in the sources I could reach. There are reports that official government communications were directed toward the lunar calendar in March 2022, scoped to administrative use and the fiscal year. That is not the same as the solar calendar being abolished for civil, school or everyday use, and I found no decree establishing that. Two commonly repeated claims — that Afghanistan dropped the zodiac names in 2023, and that it no longer officially uses the solar calendar — trace back to uncited assertions I could not corroborate.

So read this page as what it is: a guide to reading the month names printed on Afghan documents, existing and historical. A tazkira, diploma or deed already issued carries these names whatever happens next. For what today’s date is in the Iranian system, see what year is it in the Persian calendar.