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Seeing as the Roman calendar was in use throughout the western Mediterranean in the "BC era", I'm guessing Miss Sextilis was probably always the hottest monthly pinup girl of the year.
@The Futurist: In astronomy, the months and days DO go in backward order. The calendar date 01/01/01 CE (Julian day 1721423.5) was immediately preceded by 12/31/01 BCE (JD 1721422.5)
Being as the B.C. (Before Christ) calendar counted down to zero, what exactly did that calendar look like?
Did the months go in backward order?
Instead of...
January
February
March
...
They would have gone...
December
November
October
...
And the days for each month, instead of...
1
2
3
...
They would have gone...
31
30
29
...
So the first day of the year would have been December 31. The last day of the year January 1st.
And of course the years would have counted down instead of up.
It must have been confusing in the years -1, 0, 1 and 2... "That was done in the year 1!" someone says. The other person says, "Do you mean the year -1 or the year +1?"
And it must have been terrible writing the year on a check! Like 5-3-1 for A.D. year one.
But for B.C. year one, 5-3--1? (minus one?)
There were no negative numbers. First our current calendar the Gregorian calendar was only created in 1582. Only since then has it been standardized enough to be adopted worldwide, including the numbering system for years.
The Julian calendar before that didn't really number years. At least not until much later. If you wanted to specify the Christian year, you would include the words "In the Year of our Lord xxx) to indicate that you were counting the years down to the birth of Jesus Christ. But you could choose any other time point to count down to, which many civilizations did.
The concept of A.D. and B.C. wasn't even devised until the 6th century and was not widely used until the 9th century. So in short, there were no numbered years until well after that era.
This is a somewhat comical yet very interesting question in regards to trying to figure out how something functioned a long time ago.
Everything had to revolve around the sun, stars, ocean, and moon back then, hey sort of like it is today, no?. I'm LOL at some of the replies in regards to time going backwards-- as in the aging process and dates.
I'm not a scholar, thus the reason for this silly question!
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.
Last edited by bale002; 01-14-2022 at 01:51 PM..
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