approximately when did we start counting the year?
In: 15
We have probably counted years as long as we have been able to count, and judging from the existence of tally sticks in the archeological record that’s probably several hundred thousand years.
However, most early counting systems were local and short -lived, counting years since some special event like “four years after that really cold winter, or seven years after Tingar took over as chieftain”. These have pretty much all been lost to time.
Even the first long -term settled civilizations like ancient Egypt or Sumer didn’t have one count of years but operated with king lists and “the tenth years of Amun-Ra’d reign”, which makes for a lot of math and painstaking reconstruction by archeologists and historians.
Then we have some early calendars that certainly take a longer view, but without necessarily doing a linear count. Like what we today know as the Chinese and Mayan cyclical calendars . Of course if you know in which cycle something occurred these can also be counted to find which year.
Among the current linear systems, the Hebrew calendar is now at the year 5783, the Islamic year 1444, and the Gregorian calendar 2022. Although all of these have been through some minor adjustments and began counting a few years after their purported year 1.
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