How did people keep track of years in the “B.C.” times?
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A bunch of different systems. The most common (IIRC) was to date stuff by the reign of the current king – so ‘this is the third year of king X’ – but it could also be counted from the founding of the main city (like Rome did) or pretty much any big event.
And yes, this makes trying to date stuff that happened in ancient times a pain in the arse that involves a lot of cross-referencing to try and figure out roughly when the third year of king X was. Most of the time when you get an event being listed as taking place in suchandsuch BC there’s a bit of wriggle room on the number.
The whole AD thing is a lot more recent than you might think.
For most of the time before that people kept time in terms of who was in charge.
The thought it was the xth year in the reign of King soandso.
This obviously was a bit troublesome since everyone had different rulers and leadership usually didn’t change hands on a schedule.
Dating methods that used epoch like xth years since y, like the one we used today existed, but weren’t the norm.
As in, how they counted years?
First, obviously, the BC/AD divide is a Christian thing, so even *after* Christ most people on earth didn’t count up from his birth like that. The Hebrew calendar counts from the supposed creation of Earth (right now we’re in the 5700s, so they never really had a problem with being “before that”), the Islamic calendar counts from Mohammed, not Jesus (now it’s 1446).
But in most societies, years weren’t counted from some point zero, but just relative to something everyone knew about (like kings – “the 4th year of the Reign of King so-and-so” – Japan still does this to some extent). In some period of ancient Greece, due to there being no single king, years were counted from the Olympics (“second year of the so-and-so Olympiad”).
Ancient Rome also counted from the supposed founding of Rome – but that was very formal, they mostly did the same as everyone else and counted years by who was in charge (“the year of Consul X or the 3rd year of Emperor Y”)
In fact, even in many Christian and Muslim places in the middle ages, there is evidence that many common people (who didn’t really have a need for centuries for what they were measuring) also colloquially referred to years by the person in charge like that.
Mostly they didn’t. Trying to remember history *accurately*, rather than treating it as a story that can be modified as convenient, is somewhat of a Western thing to do. So is the very idea that time is linear rather than branching or circular. Anyway, most cultures would just say “Once upon a time…”, or the local equivalent, and leave it at that.
If somebody really needed to reference a particular year, they would normally just use an event that their listener would remember, like “In the year Jimmy broke his leg…”. Each community might end up giving its own “name” to each year in living memory, and forgetting any years before living memory.
Very occasionally you’d get a government that wanted to be more systematic, so would start dating its official proclamations “In the 6th year of the reign of King So-And-So”.
If it was a religious government, it might even try a mythical event, such as “In the 613th year since the Creation of the Earth”. Which is essentially what stuck: our system uses years since the supposed incarnation of Christ.
All of these are still in use today, by the way. I might tell a story without mentioning when it happened, or might say “during the Pandemic…”, or might estimate the age of a building as “Victorian”, rather than trying to put precise dates on them.
At least in ancient Summeria years were ‘counted’ by naming them after something locally significant that happened the year before.
Up to this point in the posts, a “year” has been defined. Year two etc of so and so’s rule, but even then, what defined a ”year”. At some point they noticed changes in stars, suns position etc so it must have been documented in someway besides by a persons rule or a locations existence. No?
Most all jobs used to be agrarian, and farmers knew seasons. They would count seasons.
“My boy is 10 Winters old”, etc.
“What year is it?”
“It’s 5 B.C.”
What does B.C. stand for?”
“Before Christ.”
“Who the hell is Christ?”
Historically it’s really common for there to not be a fixed starting year. You could say “two hundred thirty-one years before today” or “in the ninth year of King X”. In the middle ages authors starting dating years relative to the founding of Rome “ab urbe condita” to make their work seem older and more prestigious, though there’s no evidence that Roman writers ever did this.
The same way we keep track of years now. There was an event that happened. People counted the years since it happened.
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