what year would you consider it to be?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t B.C. translate to “before Christ?”
Not knowing there was going to be a Christ, what did people call the year(s) they were living in?
Depends on the culture. Romans used Ab urbe condita, measured from the supposed founding of Rome, 753 BC. The Jews had (have) their own, too. China and the cultures influenced by them (Japan, Korea) used their own. Japan has also measured by the reigns of Emperors. It is Heisei 24 right now.
Aside from the conventions mentioned above, years were typically referenced locally with regard to the reign of some ruler, e.g. the “fourth year of the reign of King Avaricious.”
Note that the numbering system for years since birth of Christ wasn’t devised until the Sixth Century AD, and not widely used until after AD 800.
I’m mulling over your posts. I want to think about further questions.
How incredibly complicated for historians, tho, trying to encompass all structures into a viable timeline.
Like our current system, the AUC system wasn’t adopted until centuries after its origin date. It was popularized by the Roman historian Varro in our first century BC. So most people in 356 BC would not have been aware they were living in the year 397 AUC. They would have called it the year of the Second Consulships of Ambustus and Laenas.
With the decline of consular power, the consular calendar system became replaced by the AUC system. This in turn was replaced by the Anno Diocletian system, which dated events from the year when Diocletian restored the Empire and founded the Dominate (284 AD in our system).
So when Dionysius Exiguus created the Anno Domini system, it was the Anno Diocletian system he was trying to replace. When he explained how the system would work, the example he gave was of how the current year of Anno Diocletian 248 would be Anno Domini 532.
A hundred years later, the English historian Bede popularized Dionysius’ system by using it to date events in his history. Bede also added the BC system to date events that happened prior to the year 1 AD. This, I believe, was the first “negative” calendar system which dated events from how many years they occurred before an event. Previous systems, including Dionysius’, had only been used to date events that occurred after the calendar began. If you wanted to talk about ancient events that pre-dated the start of your calendar, you just used an older calendar system.
Which is why Christ ends up having been born somewhere between 4 and 6 BC.
Japan didn’t start numbering years systematically after emperors’ reigns until 1868. Before that, the calendar was frequently reset for various reasons that included emperors beginning their reigns and fairly trivial events that were then deemed as auspicious. For a certain time during the 14th century CE, there were two systems used at the same time. Check out the list of Japanese era names and behold the crazy complexity. Between 645 and 1868, there were 236 different eras, for an average length of about 5 years. Many lasted just a year or two.
And, if anyone is wondering, this system is very much still in use.
As an aside, I caught a history show on NHK (the Japanese public broadcaster) that had motion graphics showing among other things, a count down of the dates from 2012, and clearly ending at 0 – a thoroughly meaningless date for Japanese history.
Must have been a difficult labour.
Were people aware of the different calendars used? When travelers recorded something of importance, did they set it in their time or that cultures/regions time? Or was that arbitrary? (Making it even more confusing.)
What travellers? What records?
You have a global perspective which did not exist then. A trader would not care what his customers at the forest edge called this year, as long as he knows that they bought obsidian and tallow there every year since the spotted plague wiped out those people at the river island…
Becky2844 writes:
> How incredibly complicated for historians, tho, trying to encompass all
> structures into a viable timeline.
In fact, fitting together all the various histories of the many different past civilizations was quite a difficult job. It took many historians many attempts over many years to fit everything together into a consistent chronology. One of those attempts was Bishop Ussher’s chronology:
This is usually trivialized by saying that Ussher was the one that claimed that the world was created in 4004 B.C. on a specific day at a specific time, but that was only a part of his chronology (and that approximate year was nothing new). He was trying to fit together the histories of all the civilizations mentioned in the Bible to get a consistent and accurate timeline. Reconciling all the histories recorded in all the manuscripts (and other ways by which years can be established) was a huge job for many people.
Bear in mind that the global use of the Gregorian system is something which dates from the early to mid 20th century, and in some parts of the world, other systems are still in daily use. People have been used to converting, and they would do so. Its fairly simple to do so, if you know when a certain event occured in relation to another.
To take an example, in the 50th year of the reign of Elizabeth II and the 7th of the Presidency of Jacques Chirac just before the autumn equinox, a very important event occured. What was it?
Sounds like 9/11…
Thank you for all the answers! I’m going to be kept busy looking some of these things up.
Are there any questions I should naturally include now but don’t know to?
Wouldn’t that be 2002?
Elizabeth II succeeded to the throne in Feb 1952. Her 50th year was from Feb 2001 to Feb 2002. Chirac became President in May 1995, his seventh year was from May 2001 to May 2002.
Yes it is.
Most cultures kept a list of rulers. In part because it established a sense of continuity and therefore legitimacy on the current regime. But also because it made looking up old dates possible.
I mentioned the Roman consular system before. It was actually handier than most because two new consuls were elected every year so you had a consistent system. (In a system based on monarchs, you had to account for the different length of their reigns.) Rome had public lists of past consuls, so if you were in the Year of the Consulship of Rullianus and Censorinus and you needed to know how many years back the Year of the Consulship of Visolus and Cursor was, you could look it up.
That said, it wasn’t a perfect system. There’s ample evidence that history sometimes got rewritten. A king that overthrew a rival might order his name to be removed from public records. A dynasty might try to increase its prestige by backdating its origins. A conquered city might have all its records lost. In the consular system I’ve been using as an example, there’s evidence that some families who became prominent in later Roman history had supposed ancestors added into old consular lists in order to make their family history look more prestigious.
Nowadays, most historians use the abbreviations “B.C.E.” (Before Common Era) and “C.E.” (Common Era) instead of the older “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D.” (Anno Domini).
We don’t know exactly when Christ was born but, as Colibri mentions, the best guesses have him born in one of the years traditionally referred to as “B.C.”
Ancient Greek and Roman historians would sometimes use the dates and names of winners in the Olympic games as a common reference frame, which can be one trick for syncing up events, especially when years of reigns of various rulers etc. are also mentioned.
(Btw, concerning dating by referring to rulers or administrators - note that we sometimes still do this, like when we say that something happened back in, say, the Carter administration.)