If the year 2010 was called 2173, how might history instead be interpreted??

[bob bobato]

Why would we? We don't call the 19th century that, and she dominates it in a similarly neat fashion (reigned 1837-1901).

Yeah, that's true. in a way, she might even be less associated with the alternate century since she would have died in yhe mid 2060s. But, at the same time, a 'Victorianesque' society would have lasted until the mid 2070s. If people were already used to seeing the century as 'hers', then I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to interpret the Interwar Period as a prolonged, chaotic end to the century as major elements from the era such as Nationalism and Technological Progress 'escaladed' and destroyed Europe. Today, of course, the period's usually seen as a bold beginning of a new age.

I realize that this post only uses generalities, but I figure that's the only way to describe a randomly decided century as if it were an era.

 

[BuckyRea]

I think the money shot in all this is that the switchover to the 2000s would be marked as the "start" of the industrial age and things like development of a working steam engine would be considered only an antecedent to industrialization rather than the start of it.

I wonder what event would be the point of numbering the calendar from 163bce, however.

The restoration of Ptolemy Philometor to the throne of Egypt and/or The Roman partition of Egypt?

The birth of Tiberius Gracchus?

The successful emancipation of Media from the Seleucid Empire?

Unless you have a cult try and turn Gracchus brothers into some kind of diety-prophets, I don't see an even here worth rebooting the official calendar over.

 

[Dachs]

Not really. Either because of her death, or because it's 1900 (almost), most people tend to view that point as when 'the drift to WWI' starts, with everything before that being a prelude. I think views on the war might have changed perhaps in a less determinist direction, had the years been more akwardly numbered.

Therefore, such a thing would be objectively excellent.

 

[deanej]

Actually the BC/AD divide has nothing to do with Jesus, who was born five years earlier.

 

[LightSpectra]

Actually the BC/AD divide has nothing to do with Jesus, who was born five years earlier.

"BC" means "Before Christ" and AD means "Anno Domini" (in the year of Our Lord), which itself is an abbreviation of "Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi" (in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ). So yes, it's entirely based on the birth of Christ. Dionysius Exiguus, the person who established this as the epochal divide, miscalculated when Jesus was born, and thus modern scholars think he was born in 4 BC.

 

[Ajidica]

Two quick questions.
1. Why is BC in English not Latin
2. Why didn't the monk just use the Roman Calendar and changed the naming conventions? I mean the Romans knew when Christ was born through the Census, right?

 

[LightSpectra]

Two quick questions.
1. Why is BC in English not Latin

"BC" and "AD" are modern abbreviations. Documents would spell out entirely "in the year of Our Lord..." or "Anno Domini..." before putting the number. Years prior to AD 1 used the phrase "anno igitur ante incarnationem Dominicam" (in the year before the Incarnation of the Lord).

2. Why didn't the monk just use the Roman Calendar and changed the naming conventions? I mean the Romans knew when Christ was born through the Census, right?

If there was a census document, it didn't survive to the 6th century, which was when the epochal divide was invented.

As far as I know, Dionysius Exiguus didn't intend to change the calendar conventions. He simply used that phrase to refer to a certain year, and by the end of the millennium, it became the norm.

 

[Earthling]

Not really. Either because of her death, or because it's 1900 (almost), most people tend to view that point as when 'the drift to WWI' starts, with everything before that being a prelude. I think views on the war might have changed perhaps in a less determinist direction, had the years been more akwardly numbered.

The United States also had the Spanish-American war and significant changes in political history around that time, making 1900 seem a more clear dividing point to many Americans.

 

[Plotinus]

2. Why didn't the monk just use the Roman Calendar and changed the naming conventions? I mean the Romans knew when Christ was born through the Census, right?

As LightSpectra said, no such census document ever survived, and the census that Luke describes almost certainly never took place anyway (at least, not as Luke describes it). There would certainly never have been any official documentation concerning Jesus' birth. It's possible that there was concerning his death, but if there was, that never survived either.

Dionysius Exiguus did a pretty good job, given that he was working five centuries later and trying to determine the birth date of someone who was born in utter obscurity and remained wholly undocumented until decades after their death.

It is also important to recognise that although Dionysius dated the birth of Jesus to 525 years before the time when he was writing, he didn't create a calendar system out of this. He didn't date other events according to their temporal relation to Jesus' birth. Bede was the first person to do that, some two centuries later. Moreover, although Bede popularised the AD system, there was no BC system. It was Dionysius Petavius, a seventeenth-century scholar, who introduced that system. This explains why there was no established Latin acronym for dates before Jesus.

Also, no-one actually knows when Jesus was born. The date 4 BC is often given as the most likely, on the basis that Herod the Great certainly died in that year and Matthew portrays Jesus as being born shortly before Herod's death, but this is fairly flimsy in my view, since (a) we don't know how long before Herod's death Jesus was born, and (b) we don't really know whether Matthew was right to date it before Herod's death in the first place.

 

[bob bobato]

It was Dionysius Petavius, a seventeenth-century scholar, who introduced that system.

Then how did they date BC years before the seventeenth century?

 

[deanej]

"BC" means "Before Christ" and AD means "Anno Domini" (in the year of Our Lord), which itself is an abbreviation of "Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi" (in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ). So yes, it's entirely based on the birth of Christ. Dionysius Exiguus, the person who established this as the epochal divide, miscalculated when Jesus was born, and thus modern scholars think he was born in 4 BC.

I had a teacher that said the system was based on the spread of writing in the Roman Empire. From what I've heard, the BC/AD stuff was added later by the Catholic Church.

 

[LightSpectra]

I had a teacher that said the system was based on the spread of writing in the Roman Empire. From what I've heard, the BC/AD stuff was added later by the Catholic Church.

No. The calendar used by the Roman Empire used the term "Ab urbe condita" (from the founding of the city), meaning their year 1 was 753 BC. Unless you're referring to the Julian calendar, which yes, does pre-date Christianity and was adopted for popular usage by medieval Europe; but that's not what we're talking about.

the census that Luke describes almost certainly never took place anyway (at least, not as Luke describes it).

I dispute this, but that's not on-topic at this point, so... yeah.

 

[deanej]

No. The calendar used by the Roman Empire used the term "Ab urbe condita" (from the founding of the city), meaning their year 1 was 753 BC. Unless you're referring to the Julian calendar, which yes, does pre-date Christianity and was adopted for popular usage by medieval Europe; but that's not what we're talking about.

I didn't mean the roman calendar. I meant our divide. The spread of writing is apparently what's so common about the Common Era (which IMO is a stupid term).

 

[Louis XXIV]

As I understood it, the Romans would use "in the consulship of...". I didn't realize they'd also date based on the founding of the city.

 

[Traitorfish]

As I understood it, the Romans would use "in the consulship of...". I didn't realize they'd also date based on the founding of the city.

I think the latter system came in later, possibly something to do with the Julian calendar? The date is derived from a mythological event, after all, so it stands to reason that they hadn't been counting the whole time.

 

[Plotinus]

That's right, the Romans didn't really use the AUC system. Remember that the notion of a general dating system, in which every event can be assigned a simple number on the same scale, didn't really exist in classical antiquity - or at any rate they never felt the need for one. The idea of using AUC as an alternative to the AD system, as a fully-fledged chronological system, was really a late medieval or Renaissance one projected back to antiquity.

As for how BC events were dated before Petavius, I don't know - I suppose they just didn't think of them as needing to be dated in that sort of way (i.e. all on a single scale with a single number). From the later Middle Ages onward, it was not unknown to say that a given BC event occurred so many years before Christ, to put it into context, but the notion of a fully-fledged system analogous to the AD system for pre-AD events wasn't developed until Petavius.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

It should clearly be the year 41.

Reading old Omni magazines are we? Today would be either Archimedes 15 or 16 in the year 41 A.T? I can't do math today.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Thats evidenced in philosophy with Phenomenology and the belief that each person has their own perception of everything.

That has been around since Leibniz.