approximately when did we start counting the year?
In: 15
A useful additional comment on Leftstone2’s excellent answer.
A dating system based on counting from a specific point in the past is, if you think about it, only useful in quite specialised contexts, which is why it takes a while for a system to become widespread.
For a lot of ancient (eg Sumerian or Babylonian) texts, which are often accounting or tax related, “this year”, “next year”, “last year” and that sort of thing are all you need. For people writing chronicles (on the “this happened to us” basis) you might date in relation to current political events, such as “In the 3rd Year of the reign of King Shalmaneser” or whatever. Some of my current ID documentation refers to my date of birth in terms of the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) – for official purposes that sort of dating is still widespread in japan.
But you can’t always do that. Particularly if you are reaching back into the past and trying to reconstruct it. Eg, if you are historian or antiquarian rather than a chronicler. So Roman antiquarians started using the date of the foundation of Rome (A.U.C. = ab urbe condita), but they did not all agree on the exact date which created inconsistencies.
Normal Romans would mostly have used the consular system, eg “the year in which L. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Ap. Claudius Pulcher were consuls”. But you could not do this if you wanted to delve back to the early history of Rome because they did not have consular dating way back then.
Still it is a fairly minority interest.
Enter Dionysius Exiguus (aka “Dennis the Little”) a monk from Spoleto. As far as I can tell he could speak both Greek and Latin. He certainly translated from one to the other. He was concerned with the date of Easter.
(Easter – quick summary: Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus. This happens at the time of the Jewish Passover, which is tied to the Jewish calendar. Most ancient European/North African and Middle Eastern calendars are luni-solar. You start a new year on a new moon. Annoyingly the Moon, Sun and Earth’s rotation do not line up. So you either (a) sit around and wait until you see a new moon, or you (b) work out a formula to approximate when it would be. Turns out (a) is a bit dodgy, even in Israel let alone N. Europe; also someone might hack your network. So algorithm it is).
In Alexandria (where they still spoke Greek) they had come up with a fairly good formula. In 19 years, the years, months and days nearly exactly line up (about a day out, very close on months). So you can have a sort of 19 year cycle and everything is OK. In Roman/Latin speaking Europe they didn’t really understand it not being able to read Greek (well, more accurately, Greek learning not being so accessible).
Also: mathematical formulae are all very well but you want something that can be used by random monks living on the cold shores of Northumbria, so you make a huge table with one row for each year that says when Easter etc will be.
That is what Dionysius Exiguus. A very big table. Much bigger than any table before.
And here’s the thing: he needed to date things centuries *into the future*. If you are writing about future times you can’t do “Month X of King Y” or anything like that. You need to date from a fixed point. Dennis (as he is sometimes called) disapproved of an existing system dating from the emperor Diocletian (who had persecuted Christians) and thought starting with the year of Jesus’s birth was the right thing to do. Though he miscalculated.
The first line of his table was the year in which Jesus was born. Then the next year (year 1) was the year in which Jesus had his first birthday. Etc.
Yes. This means there *was* a “year zero”, though he did not call it that, which in turn means that AD 2000 was the start of the 21st century :-).
The able was popular amongst calendar geeks, but the system of AD dating was not very well known until a Northumbrian monk called “Bede” picked it up. He wrote a very popular history which used AD for dates from Jesus’s birth onwards. It became a sort of “best seller” and AD spread around.
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