It’s weird, it’s strange, and it’s different, but I’m not knocking it if that’s all they had. They could have used the founding of Rome as a starting point, but they didn’t. Either they were comfortable with what they had, or nobody could think of a better system, and if it’s the latter that surprises me. They were as smart as we are.
I mean, it would be weird to you because of your specific experience, plus neglecting (or ignoring) the fact that 1954 literally means “in the 1,954th year of the eternal and unending reign of the ever-living King of the Universe Jesus Christ.”
It’s just regnal dating with a very long baseline.
If you’re not Christian, like me, it’s just an arbitrary agreed-to start of our modern dating scheme. Regardless, it’s still far simpler than what the Romans used was my only point. If I was alive during Roman times I might not think that.
FWIW, your attitude is a cultural artifact. Other cultures retain old-style calendar epochs like regnal epochs as part of their current dating systems.
Ancient backwards third-world cultures like Japan. /s
No, they did, sometimes. They just didn’t use that system very often.
And I don’t think that regnal years are quite the same thing as Roman consul years: Regnal years still use numbers, and most reigns will be much longer than consulates. If the current monarch has reigned for 20 years, then I can relate a year 5 years ago to one 15 years ago mathematically, just like I can with the current Western system. You only need to remember the succession and so forth when you’re dealing with times that span multiple reigns, which are at least somewhat uncommon.
Do most ordinary Japanese people think of the calendar that way? If the subject was the year that the US bombed Hiroshima, would they think to themselves”that was in the 18th year of the Showa era” or would the think “that was in 1945?”
WRT the Romans, wouldn’t sticking exclusively with the reign of the consul system cause more difficulty when dealing with people from other cultures? My guess is even an educated Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Jew, etc. wouldn’t have been familiar with them, much less the Gauls, Visigoths, and other people that were pre-literate.
I don’t find this at all odd - it makes perfect sense, and I would have been astonished if it were otherwise. It’s not like a countdown to something happening in the future. Time was still running forwards then!
By analogy, if you ask me what I was doing throughout June 3 years ago, I don’t run my memory backwards in time. I jump to “minus three years”, and then think through what I was doing in June in the normal forward direction of time.
But people have certainly tried to make much more of it - in suggesting that the millenium didn’t “really” start until Jan 1st 2001, as though somebody started a stopwatch on Jan 1st 0001.
Keep in mind in terms of varying “relative” year systems–it isn’t that much of a problem because there was very little reason until relatively recently for most humans to be specifically concerned about what “year” it was on some metaphysical “calendar.” That just wasn’t that meaningful to people’s lives.
The change of the seasons was very important. Tracking how many “years” you had been alive, was also culturally important for many–but you don’t need to know what “calendar year” you were born to know that you just have to have kept track.
For legal and scholastic purposes, in some contexts, a good accounting of the years, at least over some portion of time, could have been important–but remember, until quite recently the vast, vast majority of humanity was employed in agriculture or agriculture adjacent activities. The need to know that your “current year” was some fixed “number” that lots of other people around the world (whom you never interacted with) agreed upon…just wasn’t important.
I would also speculate most non-wealthy, non-powerful Romans probably weren’t that concerned about consular years either. Roman society was pretty oligarchical even in the Republican era, a lot of the common folk likely weren’t as obsessed with consular lineages and things of that nature (it isn’t necessarily easy to tell, basically all Roman writers were from some class of wealth–that doesn’t mean they were Patricians, which had a more specific meaning often misunderstood by modern casual understanding, but a wealthy Plebeian who is educated, literate, and an accomplished enough writer that his works are preserved to the modern times likely existed in the upper levels of society.)
In monarchical countries regnal years probably had some useful chronological meaning for people. Even the peasant class was often generally aware at some point when a new King had been crowned, and celebrations would often be had. Using phrases like “this happened in the 6th year of Raedwald’s reign” wouldn’t be that confusing and would probably be more useful than referencing an esoteric calendar that maybe only a few monks were fiddling with.
I’m curious how old you are. I’ve gotten to the point where it’s a lot easier for me to take the current year and subtract my birth year than it is to keep count of the birthdays, and I could easily live twice this long.
I mean, if you’re literally saying it’s easier to remember two largish numbers and perform arithmetic on them, than remembering one smaller number, that says more about your cognitive and mnemonic processes than it says about the objective difficulty of the relative tasks.
The only trouble I have remembering my monotonically increasing age is remembering that it incremented after my birthday. That usually gives me trouble for about a week, about as long as remembering that January also starts a new calendar year.
I’m the same as @Chronos, and I think there’s nothing strange here. I’m never going to forget my birth year, which is a constant. And I always know the current year, because I’m constantly seeing it and writing it. But my age is a variable that changes every year, and when the value no longer holds much significance (like reaching 16 or 18 or a landmark birthday like 50) I can quite easily forget the current value. I’m not going to completely forget my age, but I sometimes have to think about it for a moment, plus or minus one.
Me too. But of course we live in a society in which we do keep track of what year it is numerically; and we are frequently reminded of what year it is. None of this would be true if we lived in a society with a different sort of calendar, so we can’t take this as evidence that our way of specifying years is the natural one.
Me, too. And for exactly these reasons.
Sure, we don’t express precise dates as “in the second year of the Eisenhower presidency”; we’d use the umber 1954 in the Gregorian calendar for that. But I think when we refer to more extended periods, things like “the Reagan years” (for the 1980s) or “the late Victorian era” (for the late 19th century) are not uncommon, and people assume that readers or listeners know which time is being referred to. I admit it’s not a perfect analogy to Roman consul-style eponymous dating, I simply mentioned it to indicate that the basic idea is not all that far-fetched.
Perhaps another (still imperfect, admittedly) analogy is referring to Olympic games by the city they took place in rather than the year. I might well say “Michael Phelps was the dominant swimmer in the Beijing Olympics” in lieu of “Michael Phelps was the dominant swimmer in the 2008 Olympics”, assuming that my audience will know when the summer Olympics were in Beijing. Of course that would not replace our accustomed calendar, it would simply be that in this particular context, the assumption that people are familiar with the sequence of Olympic games will help them know which time I’m talking about without naming a year numerically.
Or more likely, it shows that the association of which city an athlete performed at is more memorable and perhaps more interesting than the sequential date. Which might well have been true about years, consuls, and Romans, too. They may have been clear that this house was built during that consulate, and not cared very much whether it was built before or after some other house in another neighborhood.
Add me to the “calculate age from year of birth and current year” group, and I’m only 47. I’ve found myself for several year thinking of myself as soon X years old several months before my actual Xth birthday to the extent that I then confuse myself, very briefly, about which birthday it actually is.
This.
It is far more typical of human societies, historically, to date things by notable events than by some standard. “She was born the year the river flooded, and the town built the new church, that is, twelve years ago.”
For example I often still figure out how long ago something was by how old my daughter was at the time, and that’s not uncommon.
Following up on this line started by @Chronos …
My underlying mental aptitude / attitude is favorable to this approach.
Now at the age of 63 I can report that through much of my 40s and 50s I often had to do that same math since my immediate recollection of my age only lasted a week or so from the last time I’d calculated it. And my age just didn’t come up as a topic all that often; more like immediately pre-birthday celebration and that was it.
From where I am now, with several major life changes just having happened, and retirement looming at my 65th birthday in a mere 15 months, once again I know my current age and would never have to calculate it. This has been true for 2 or 3 years now.
Separately …
For a few years back around age 30 I ran a phone-based business where we had to verify the ages of our customers. This was all pre-internet. Asking their age & birthdate was part of my operators’ Q&A script to open a charge account with us, but the questions were asked separately each at a surprising = illogical point in the typical mundane data gathering. The intent being to surprise, and so catch, underaged folks lying to us.
There was a real tendency that up to about age 35 almost everybody knew their age cold. Up around 60 to maybe 70, same thing. Between 35 and 60 it was much more likely to get an answer like “Hmm, I haven’t thought about that in awhile … 1985 minus 42 … I’m 43.”
We didn’t have enough elderly customers to have much anecdata on them, but since ultimately our interest was simply satisfying ourselves they were over 21, their mature to old to elderly sounding voice was credentials enough. The ones who were really 33 who sounded 19 where our false-positive problem, whereas the ones who were 19 with a full grown voice and a well-practiced lie were our false negatives.
Interesting.
Indeed, the Bible contains several examples of that. Isaiah chapter 6 starts out, “In the year that king Uzziah died. . . .”