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!
In: 54
Year one has been originally established as the supposed heat of the birth of Christ. So AD is “anno Domini”, meaning “in the year of the Lord”. BC is simply “before Christ” – counting backwards from that year one. Later people figured that tying everything to religious figures is too presumptuous and invented the terms CE and BCE to replace AD and BC correspondingly, meaning “current era” and “before current era”. AD and CE are the same and are the years that we normally use, like the current year is 2023 CE (or 2023 AD). BP is a time scale used mainly in archaeology and the like, and is defined as the number of years before 1950.
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