Good afternoon, everyone ! I would like to know why is the Ethiopian calendar 7 to 8 years behind the American (or otherwise known as the gregorian) calendar.
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I said American calendar and then gregorian calendar instead of only saying the gregorian calendar, because I thought not many people would understand me if I said gregorian calendar first, even though I know this calendar was made by the catholic church and its the calendar used in most of the world.
In short, it’s because they used different calculations to find the first year of the calendar. From Wikipedia:
> To indicate the year, followers of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches today use the Incarnation Era, which dates from the Annunciation or Incarnation of Jesus on 25 March AD 9 (Julian), as calculated by Annianus of Alexandria c. 400; thus its first civil year began seven months earlier on 29 August AD 8. Meanwhile, Europeans eventually adopted the calculations made by Dionysius Exiguus in AD 525 instead, which placed the Annunciation eight years earlier than had Annianus. This causes the Ethiopian year number to be eight years less than the Gregorian year number from January 1 until 10 or 11 September, then seven years less for the remainder of the Gregorian year.
In both Ethiopia and Europe scholars wanted to define a calendar based on the year of Christ’s birth. Being they were four or five centuries after the fact, they calculated the date using scriptural evidence and historical documents. Ultimately, they arrived at two different calculations, with the Ethiopian reckoning being that Jesus was born about eight years later than they concluded in Europe. In Europe this calendar system was called Anno Domini (AD) but since the 20th century has also been called the Common Era (CE) and is used across most of the world.
As an aside, according to modern scholarship both estimates are wrong, and Jesus was actually born sometime between 6 and 4 BCE.
So the main reason everyone uses the same calendar is that one time when a couple of European countries colonized basically everyone and told them to use it or else. Or slightly more charitably it followed the spread of Christianity.
Ethiopia was never properly colonized so no one forced them to switch their calendar.
So were a lot of other places but given the prevalence of the Gregorian calendar most switched over to the one in majority use to make international trade easier. Ethiopia just didn’t.
Calendars are very subjective. Everyone generally agrees how long a day lasts (at least on average), but everything else is up for grabs. Weeks, months, and years all vary in length depending on the culture. Because of the political and economic power that Europe and the USA have had for several hundred years, most countries use the European/Christian calendar, either exclusively or in addition to a local traditional calendar.
Choosing a year as the “start” of your calendar is also completely subjective. The Gregorian calendar uses a guess of the date when Jesus was supposedly born as the year 1 AD and counts from there. Some Christian groups such as those in Ethiopia also use Jesus’s birth, but they have a different guess as to the date that occurred. In non-Christian cultures, the calendars are obviously not based on Jesus’s life but on some other important historical event. The Hebrew calendar is based on the creation of the universe, according to ancient Torah scholars. China has traditionally based year counts on when various emprorers assumed the throne. In North Korea, the official (but little used) calendar is based on the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the current regime.
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