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Old 01-14-2022, 04:05 PM
 
Location: Oregon Coast
15,190 posts, read 8,784,974 times
Reputation: 20220

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Quote:
Originally Posted by bale002 View Post
It is silly.

If we were serious about a “common era”, it would start with industrialization. For love of a round number, I would propose 1800 as year zero of the common era, also not insignificantly the year of the very first electric battery.

Anyway, from the times of the successors of Alexander up until around the year 525, most people, at least those who were literate and numerate, in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia areas officially counted years by the founding of the Seleukid dynasty or the reigns of the Ptolemaic kings and later the Roman emperors or from the founding of the city of Rome, etc. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians before the Persians had their own ways of reckoning times and years, probably also based on king and pharaoh lists. And so on in other regions of the world.

Also worthy of note, for many people the new year began on or around September 1st, after the summer harvest. We have vestiges of this even in the US where the official fiscal year begins on October 1st.

By 525 in the western Mediterranean, it probably became apparent that an emperor at Rome would not return after some 50 years of vacancy, so someone came up with a new scheme.


It’s time we came up with a new scheme too, but this “common era”/“before common era” crap is a goddamn cop-out, it makes those who use it look like copy cats and stupid monkeys, not scholars.

Let’s get serious and make a real change, it would sell a lot of new history textbooks and calendars, even electronically, so apropos.
I would choose Midnight January 1, 1970. Unix time: 0.

Actually I would probably just create an entirely new calendar, and start it at 0 with the implementation. I would make lots of improvements too. The first day of the year would be the Winter Solstice. Every month would have 30 or 31 days instead of the current mix match of 28 to 31 days, or just use the four seasons instead of months, based on solar time. I would probably make weeks 10 days long while I was at it.
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