What is the earliest historical event that can be reliably pinned down to a specific day? These are the closest I’ve found but with a lot of ambiguity as to the year:
The Battle of Megido is supposed to have occurred on April 16, 1457 BC, although it was possibly 1479 or 1482.
25 April 1444 or 1446 for the Exodus of the Israelites.
Also, are there any dates on which a significant event occurred on both the BC and AD date?
It’s going to be something recorded in ancient Mesopotamian records. The birth of a royal heir, maybe? We can pin the Mesopotamian calendar down to the day via their records of observations of Venus.
If you’re christian, than God separating the Heavens and the Earth. As Chronos stated, some where in the Mesopotamia.
Your standard for “earliest historical event with a confirmed date” apparently includes events that almost certainly never occurred but have an attributed date, such as the Exodus. As such I’m sure there are dozens of creation myths with specific dates hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago and some modern fiction has specific dates going back billions of years.
Or are we restricting this to events with an attributed date that a majority of historians accept actually happened?
Is it like the Babylonian Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa? Do you have a link to something about the Mesopotamian calendar? Google hasn’t helped me. I would have thought there would be a list of birthdates of kings, dates of battles, etc somewhere.
The latter. I didn’t realise the Exodus has no historical basis. It came up on the Wikipedia page for 1440s BC but now I see it says it’s the date given in the Hebrew bible.
What’s an historical event? Would: “Priest X paid 60 lambs for 300 bushels of barely” be “an historical event”, if it were recorded with a date?
I was thinking of significant events as they are more likely to be recorded. I imagined it would be unlikely for an everyday event to be datable in isolation from any other occurence around the same time.
I think there are eclipses that were recorded in ancient records and the dates can be calculated based on what we know now about how often they happen.
We can’t be sure, because it might just be colorful writing - exaggerating to make his birth more ospicious… "He was born when venus was at " favourable location.
Because the tablets use years with respect to the year of enthronement of their ruler, ("In the 8th year that Joe was Emperor ") all the dates are as vague as the years of emplacement and births , since its hard to be sure the astronomy was a valid observation…
This affects pretty much everything until papyrus, since there’s no room on tablets to write multiple date references to confer accuracy. It also affects papyrus,
eg Here’s an early one, but the dates for the King’s aren’t established well enough for the dates mentioned to be locked into specific DECADES…somewhere in that CENTURY is the best they can do … Teaching for King Merykara - Wikipedia …
So somewhere along the line that improves, but dates are still problematic toward Julius Ceaser… but the death of Roman Caeser’s is quite well documented, for example… Julius Ceaser establishes the accurate Julian calendar, and ensures the start of the year is well known …so thats when dates really become solid specific days. (rather than just used for relative measurements… such as for days of work and paying rent. )
Tacitus and Herodotus are among the first historians to attach academic rigor to factual accounts of the past, so anything before the 4th Century BC is a bit suspect. I’d look up the specifics, but Wikipedia appears to be offline at the moment.
The earliest known Babylonian record is of the eclipse that took place on May 3, 1375 B.C.E
Meanwhile, as for the Chinese:
The earliest record of a solar eclipse comes from ancient Chinese history. Identifications of this event have varied from 2165 – 1948 BCE, though the favoured date is October 22, 2137 BCE
Historical Solar Eclipses. Starting in 2137 BCE
The Battle of Halys occurred on May 28, 585 BC. We know this because the ancient chronicles record that an eclipse occurred during the battle and modern astronomers have been able to work backwards and identify the precise date on which the eclipse occurred at that location.
This is believed to be the oldest significant historical event which we can place on a precise provable date.
OP asked for specific day, so lets drop all the ones that do not even have a specific year.
I am with the folks who say something that can be tied to an astronomical event. There are lots of old things dated by the people who recorded them, but determining the exact meaning of their dates can become very problematic. So on the extremely old, confirmation via astronomy would be just the ticket.
But barring external confirmations like astronomy, anyone know what the oldest correct and currently understood chronological system is? It aint Rome, we know that for well more than half its history the dates we get from their records are incorrect, and cannot tell which of two alternatives would be right instead. We know everything there is off by a few years in an uncertain direction for 500+ years.
I know that in the ancient Mediterranean in general attempts to correlate different regional dating systems are so difficult as to be more or less impossible. But maybe we have a really good king list from just one culture that we can tie to firm dates?
I’m surprised there is not more evidence in the records of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The major pyramid-building spree happened somewhere between 2600 and 2300BC.
On the contrary, that gives you exactly what you want. If you know from the records that Venus came out of opposition on the 217th day of the eighth year of Emperor Joe, and you know from the astronomy what date that was in our calendar, then you know that Emperor Joe was coronated 7 years and 217 days prior to that.
And we know that the astronomical records are accurate, because they would have been impossible to falsify without more knowledge than they had at the time. Indeed, the only way they could have gained the knowledge to make falsifications would be to have accurate records to begin with.
This is just what I was thinking – astronomical events that were noted at the time and some of them (eclipses, recurring comets) can be confirmed mathematically by today’s astronomers.
250 years later, a Babylonian chronicle by giving astromonical informations allows us to [recisely date the events before and after the battle of Gaugamela .