Looking at the timeline of human history we calculate years according to the birth of Christ. Anything before Christ’s birth was BC, after is AD. How did people of the ancient world figure out what year it was? Say, 200 years before Christ’s birth, people didn’t say it was “200 BC”. They had no idea that Christ was to be born in 200 years!!!
First of all, many people in the world do not accept the terms BC and AD because of their reference to Christ and his status as the Messiah. However, those people generally use timeframes which correspond to the BC/AD distinction. For example, some people use BCE (i.e. Before Common Era) for BC, and CE (i.e. Common Era) for AD.
That being said, before and during the time of Christ, time was generally measured based on who was king and any other big events that occurred.
So, for example, ancient writing will talk about events which occured “the fourth year of the rule of king so-and-so” or “ten years after the destruction of whatchamacallit.”
There was no universal calendar for years like we use now. Although there was a rather extensive system of months which allowed for festivals to occur at roughly the same time every year (i.e. with respect to the changing of the seasons and whatnot).
Often people would reckon time by the years of the reign of some ruler. For instance, such a time might be the seventh year of the Kingship of Whats-his-name. This you can find in some legal documents from English history - I recall reading documents in my studies from such and such a year of the rule of certain kings of England. This method was used by some ancient peoples as well.
Alternatively, many regions did not use our current calender system until relatively recently (some do not still). I believe that Jews, Arabs, and the Chinese for instance all use different calendar systems that would call the period we are living in something other than AD 2003. They do not mark their calendar by the birth of Christ at all.
Still another example would be of the Roman Republic. Many times authors in this period would mark the time as being the year of the consulship of various individuals.
We calculate the dates that certain events occured by comparing the way in which these histories flow together and then counting back or forward from events we can date into our system.
I guess I should add that the Jewish calendar is currently in the year 5763. This supposedly references the number of years since creation. I am not sure when this calendar was first shown to have been used in ancient times, if at all.
Different places used different methods, but the most common was probably to number things according to the current ruler. Something like “The Twelfth Year of the Reign of King Bob”. In the Roman Republic, the head honchos were the two Consuls, who only served for one year, so you could just say “in the year of the consulate of Bobus and Frankus”. It was also convenient to have numbers, too, (especially if you don’t have a good memory for history), so the Romans also used dates AUC, which is a Latin abbreviation for “Since the founding of the City”, referring to the supposed date when Romulus founded Rome. There were also various religious calendars in use; the Jews, for instance, numbered (and still do number) years from the date when the world was supposed to have been created.
“Beer please.”
“Can I see your ID?”
“Sure.”
“Hmmm. Born in the year Argentina attacked Falkland Islands. So, what’ll it be? Budweiser?”
It gets really confusing when we use terms like, “In the second year of the rule of George Bush, the United States attacked Iraq.”
Does the average Jew believe that or do they just accept it as tradition?
Understanding that there is no such thing as the “average jew,” I think that moderist jews accept this as mere tradition while traditionalists, ironically, believe it to be fact. Such traditionalists look at evidence of an evolutionary process as a test that God has given humanity to determine whether we truly accept and believe God’s teachings.
Japan, today, still uses dynastic numbering of years for the civil calendar – but use the Gregorian calendar for purposes of months/days/leap years, i.e. New Year’s is Jan. 1, there will be 29 days in next February. We’re in the year Heisei 15, “Heisei” being the reign title of Akihito. In the historic tradition of calendars, the years are ordinals, with no year zero: 1989 was Heisei 1 but it started as Showa 64 (the Showa emperor, Hirohito, died in January).
If the question is how come the count of years from a slightly-askew estimate of Jesus Christ’s birth is the standard even in many non-Christian societies, well, that’s just what Christian Europe adopted as a benchmark in the early Middle Ages and it just so happened they became the global-dominant cultural bloc and it’s convenient to standardize to the Big Players.
The Roman calendar would have been used across a wide swath of Europe and western Asia. Given the strength of the Roman empire, its calendar was probably used or at least referred to elsewhere, just as the Christian calendar eventually became today’s standards even in non-Christian countries.
And the Roman calendar most definitely influenced that later Christian calendar, which, to grossly simplify, took over the Roman year and renumbered its start.
A good history of it is available here.
And don’t forget the Chinese calendar, which is not quite as old as the Jewish calendar. Also the Mayans.
Thanks for all the great input. To further the question…I understand the idea of referencing times of rulers or kings or events, but was there a bigger picture, if you will, as to how time was kept. “The 7th year of king So and So” would have been in the year “XXXX”. I know now that WE can say it was XXXX BC but did they have some sort of larger calender back then?
No, there was no bigger picture. There were charts of the lengths of the rule of the kings, but there was no single linear numbering of years.
The smallest year number award goes to Taiwan. In Taiwan it is currently the year 92. The start the counting from the 1911 revolution.
Haj
How did people tell how old they were? I would think it would’ve been hard to figure out a person’s age without a year system set up. Especially when you start outliving one, two or three emperors/kings. (“Okay, Roger was born in the 4th year of King Ralph, and Ralph ruled for 10 years and 2 months. Then King Gunther ruled about 6 years and 9 months, and now King Harpo is in his 8th year…so I guess Roger’s about 20ish.”)
And what about Art Van Furniture sales?
“Nothing down and no payments or interest til King Ralph’s 16th year!”
WHAT IF RALPH DOESN’T MAKE IT TO HIS 16TH YEAR?!?!?
(Yeah, chew on that one for a while.)
Happy
Happy Lendervetter writes:
> How did people tell how old they were?
They kept track of their own age. By the time they had gotten old and their memory was weak, they frequently didn’t know what their exact age was. Exact ages for older people is a fairly recent thing. That’s why there were so many claims of absurdly old ages before the twentieth century. Maybe you could find the church book with the record of the baptism and maybe not. If not, the person could add a few years and make himself sound even older than he was.
No one kept time until the railroads were running a little over a century ago, so no big surprise that the calendar was not a big concern a few thousand years ago.
Chew on that, Trags63.
Not everyone measured time forwards. The Mayans counted back from a celestial event they predicted in 2012. Their calender will end then.
I’m sure Douglas Adams used that idea in the Guide, but I can’t remember which section it was to find the quote. Anyone?