When did we start counting years in our current calendar? Did Jesus die and people just said “ok we are now in 33AD and there will be 12 sections every year, each with around 30 days”.
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Those things all came around at different times.
The oldest calendars are lunar calendars – the moon orbits the earth 12 times a year, plus a few straggler days that make every lunar calendar a disaster. Calendars have had “moonths” for as long as we’ve been writing about it.
The ancients eventually noticed that the solar year isn’t 365 days long either, it’s a frustrating 365.2425 days long and so you need to add leap days in occasionally to stop drift. The Romans put this into place two thousand years ago.
Setting the birth of Jesus as year zero didn’t come around until the 6th century. The church got tired of trying to synchronize calendars between different kingdoms with their own zero date based on local rulers and dynasties, and so they worked backwards to try and calculate when Jesus was probably born to set a global year zero for all church records.
They’re probably actually off by a few years, but they got pretty close considering the source documents they had to work with.
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