Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Year One

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

I am speaking these words in the year 2021. You might be listening to them in a different year, but whatever year you happen to be in right now, it will be a year using the same number convention for years that we do now. But why did we start counting years at year 1? What did they do before that? Who picked year 1 and why? Why isn’t there a year zero? And what is the deal with AD and CE? Learn more about why we count years the way we do on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm speaking these words to you in the year 2021. You might be listening to them in a different year, but whatever year you happen to be in right now, it will probably be a year using the same number convention for years. But why did we start counting years at year one? And what did they do before that? And who picked year one and why? And why isn't there a year zero?

And what's the deal with AD versus CE? Learn more about why we count years the way we do on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nicolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely.

Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Hi, I'm Stephen and I present the Simple English News Daily podcast. Monday to Friday, me and my co-host Namita,

Tell the most important stories in the world in just seven minutes. Start your day by listening to World News in simple, clear language. Search in your podcast app for Simple English News Daily. I've had several episodes in the past which touched on the making of our modern calendar. I've talked about the development of the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendars. I've talked about why January 1st is the start of the new year and where the names of our months come from. However, I've never really talked about why we number our years the way we do. Every civilization had its own way of counting years. The Islamic calendar counts years beginning with the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina.

The Chinese calendar doesn't have a running number of years as the Gregorian calendar does. They simply have 60-year cycles, which does make it hard to determine the dates in the distant past. The Hebrew calendar is based on the number of years since creation. In this year, 2021, the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, marked what they believed to be 5,782 years since the creation of the world, or at least as determined by medieval Jewish scholars. All of these systems were far better than what the Romans used to do to determine years. Initially, the Romans didn't use numbers to refer to years. They used the names of the consuls who were elected for that year. It was an incredibly confusing system that required you to know the names of every Roman consul if it were

to be meaningful. Eventually, they did also track years as Aburbe Condita, which means from the foundation of the city, which occurred in 753 BC. However, they still might reference recent years or the current year by the names of the consuls. For example, in 59 BC, it was the year of Caesar and Bilbus. Crowds dumped dung onto the head of Bilbus one day, and he spent most of the rest of the year in hiding. That led to the Roman joke that it was actually the year of Julius and Caesar. While the Roman system of counting years was awkward, their calendar itself, set up by Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar, was actually pretty good. It was a strictly solar calendar, and that was what separated it from the other calendars I've mentioned. The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, and the Chinese and Hebrew calendars are hybrid luny solar calendars.

With the rise of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, the calendaring system changed and began counting the years based on the ascension of Diocletian. You would reference a year as Anno Diocletianai. Diocletian was one of the biggest persecutors of Christians. The fledgling Christian community began using the same dating convention, but instead of calling their years Anno Diocletianai,

they named it after the martyrs and called the years Ano Matrium, or the year of the martyrs. If you remember back to my episode in the Gregorian and Julian calendars, one of the things that drove the early Christian obsession with calendars was calculating Easter. In the year 520, A monk who lived in what is today modern-day Bulgaria named Dionysus exigus was calculating dates for Easter.

He didn't like the fact that the calendar convention was based on one of the worst Christian persecutors of all time, Diocletian. He thought that it made much more sense for the Christian church to count their years based on the life of Jesus. So he did just that. He called these years Anno Domini, or the Year of Our Lord. In his list, he went directly from Anomartiram 247 to Anno Domen. Domini 525. The system created by Dionysus Exegus didn't catch on right away, and actually took centuries for the Anodominy system to take off.

The first person to use the system in writing that we know of was the English Benedictine monk, venerable Bede, who used it in 679. This system wasn't the only Christian calendar in the early church. A monk from Alexandria called Anianus, around the year 400, created a calendar which was based upon the Annunciation, or the conception of Jesus. This calendar is still used today by the Ethiopian Coptic Church. Anyana set the start of his calendar to be March 25th in the year 9. And here I'll refer you back to my episode on why Christmas is on the date it is.

This is almost a 10-year difference from the year of birth for Jesus set by Dionysus Exegis. Given the large difference in dates, the big question is, did Dionysus Exegis get the date right for the birth of Jesus? The answer is, probably not. We have no idea why he picked the year he did to be year one. There's nothing in the Bible that can put a hard date on when Jesus was born. Most scholars put the date of Jesus' birth around 4 to 6 BC. So, okay, he got the year wrong, but it's a thought that counts. And the calendar was intended to have year one be the year Jesus was born.

So how do you count the years before year one? This unquestionably is the weakest part of our calendaring system. There is no year zero, which both makes sense and doesn't make sense. You expect zero to come before one, but if you're dating things from an event, then before that event is one year before the event. There is no zero. Either way, calculating dates becomes really tricky as you move past year one. For example, 1021 was 1,000 years ago. The year 21 was 2,000 years ago, and 21 BC was 2042 years ago?

More on this problem in a bit. The use of BC to signify something before the year one comes from English, unlike AD, which is Latin. It traditionally meant before Christ. In Latin, the common usage was to use Antichristumnatum, which was abbreviated ACN, and literally means before the birth of Christ. Likewise, you might occasionally see PCN, which stands for post-Christomnatum, which means after the birth of Christ. It was an alternative to AD, but PCN never really caught on. Here I might as well address one of the big questions of what to call the periods of time before or after the year one. Traditionally, the years beginning with one are abbreviated AD for Anno Domini.

That's what I said before. This always rubbed non-Christians the wrong way or Christian groups that didn't follow a calendar based on the birth of Christ. You'll notice that when I give dates for this podcast, I never use AD. This is because if you give a year without any indication, it is implicit that I'm talking about the years since year one. If I don't indicate that it occurred before year one, then it should always be assumed that I'm talking about after year one. Many people now use CE instead of AD. CE is usually understood to mean common era. The use of common era is older than you might think.

The first written use of it dates back to Johannes Kepler, who wrote in Latin, Anus Are Nostre Volgarest, or the year of our common era. The original English translation of this was not common era, but rather unconstitutional. Vulgar era. Vulgar originally meant ordinary people and didn't have the same connotation it does today. It was used to separate the church calendar from the system of counting years of a monarch known as regal years. By the 18th century, the term common era was being used more and more in English. In the 19th century, it was the preferred term for Jewish scholars. Some religious scholars used common or vulgar to differentiate the true birth of Jesus, or anodominy, which would have been

Common Era plus 4, because they got it wrong. Some people have taken to not defining what CE means at all. It can mean Common Era, it can mean Christian era, or it could be calendar era. Take your pick. Personally, I think we should all start a movement to start using Vulgar Era again. With respect to the period before this, those who use the Common Era Convention usually use BCE, which means before Common Era. My personal use in this podcast is a hybrid.

I avoid AD or CE altogether as I explained above. But if I had to use one, I'd probably use CE with the intent that it simply refers to calendar era, which I believe is more accurate than common era. I personally use BC just because it's so well known, and I think it's just easier to stick with a two-letter naming convention. Also, BC doesn't have the same implications that AD does. Furthermore, you can again define the C in BC to mean whatever you want. both the ADBC and the CEBCE styles can be found in regular use. The BBC uses AD and BC, whereas other organizations use CE and BCE.

But what if there was a way to clean up this whole mess? What if there was a simple way to stop having to count backwards before the year one and a way to totally toss aside this whole CEAD debate? Well, there is, and personally I'm a big fan of it, as it solves so many of the problems and it's very easy for. for everyone to understand. It's called the Holocene calendar, abbreviated H.E. The Holocene is the geologic period that we are in now, and it ended after the last Ice Age. To determine the Holocene calendar, all you have to do is add 10,000 to the current year, or put a one in front of it. That's it.

Instead of being the year 2021, it would be the year 12021, or 12,021. There would be no more counting backwards after the year one. The year one in the current calendar would be 10,0001. You can calculate BC years by just subtracting the date from 10,0001. The year one in the Holocene calendar is so far back that there's no recorded history. There's nothing special about that year, other than that it's a nice round number of years before one, and it predates every recorded civilization. It's far enough back that even Golbeki Tempe wouldn't require going past the year one. Gobecki Tempe would have been constructed around the year 500 He. Anything we know before about the year 1-H.E.

It would be so old that you would just reference it as BP for before-present, which is how most truly old things are dated anyhow. I have no illusions about the Holocene calendar catching on, but you have to admit it's simple and it solves most of the problems. It might get some traction with historians and archaeologists, but probably not much beyond that. as it stands, we'll probably keep using our current system, as messy as it is, which is based on the estimated date of birth of Jesus by a monk in Bulgaria, who probably got the date wrong.

The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.