How did people keep track of years in the “B.C.” times?
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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.
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