So I’ve tried googling this before and I am still so stupid and confused like my brain cannot wrap around how to read these different abbreviations for time and what they actually mean.
The easiest is B.P. (Before present/1950) because I can just do the calculation to turn that into C.E. (Current Era – so like saying 2023 CE is right now, right?), but how do these ways of expressing time translate to one another?
Like for example, A.D. (“in the year of the lord”, but does this translate to C.E.? Are these the same?) 500 vs 500 B.C. (Before Christ? I’m not religious so idk what this really means irl). How are these different and how do they translate into B.P. And C.E. terms? How can I remember which one to use? Explain it to me like I’m 5 and like it’s my first day on the fucking planet. Thank you!
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Because AD and BC have a religious theme in their name people have come up with CE and BCE as alternative labels.
They mean the same thing. AD = CE and BC = BCE
AD was originally based on when a medieval monk thought Jesus Christ was born. Modern scholars who treat the birth of Jesus Christ as an actual historical event believe the original calculation was off by a few years.
The dating system has been widely adopted around the world even by non-Christians. To make it more neutral people have pushed to related it from Anno Domini, the year of the Lord, to Common Era which has no religious connections, but means the same thing.
Note that there is no year 0 in this scheme it went from 1BC to 1AD.
Before Present is not really used in the same way that AD is. It is mostly used in pre-historic dating rather than to describe the timing of actual historic events. It is used for things that happend much longer ago.
For most things dated with BP they happend so long ago and are estimates anyway, that the fact that “present” is a moving reference point doesn’t matter.
A related idea is giving time frames as “years ago”. Mya as in million years ago is used in fir example paleontology.
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