I just saw a video about BC/AD as opposed to BCE/CE and the invention of the Gregorian calendar and I wondered what year it would be if we counted the years like the Romans did.
If we counted years from the reign of the Yellow Emperor using Sun Yat-sen’s approach, this year would be 4722.
In my mode of timing, I personally use the year 4241 BC as my 1 AD as it’s the first year of recorded history. It’s not nationalistic and is something that can be traced back to with precision.
There’s a small problem in that blog: it has some grotesque inaccuracies.
The part that stood out for me, though, was this:
The fourth part of my system is the seven-day work week. Different cultures around the world have had a different number of days of a week. The ancient Chinese had eight for example. The Aztecs had weeks defined as having five days. I technically go by six. It’s just easier. You will find it easier too, I guarantee that. Whose idea was it to have a prime number as the number of week days?
The ancient Chinese had a bewildering number of calendar systems with highly variable lengths of week-equivalents. They had 10-day weeks, 12-day weeks, 7-day weeks, 9-day weeks, indeed practically every number you can conceive of has been a week length in ancient Chinese calendar systems except—ironically enough—8-day weeks.
Incidentally, time systems in China are also horrifically complicated with divisions of the day into 15 “hours” (but only divided such during daytime hours) in very ancient times. Later a bizarre system that had daytime divisions of 10(更), 12(时), 60(点), 100(刻), 6000(!)(分), and even 600,000(!!)(秒) all being used at once was in play. (There’s a few more but i can’t be arsed to pull out my reference books; they’re used in marginal cases.)
Why so many units of time? Isn’t it irrational? Not really, no. Because differing activities had more useful divisions of the day for units. It turns out that consistency is very much the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s like how we use different speed measurements today internationally: km/h mostly, but also “nautical miles per hour” in the aircraft industry (alongside Mach numbers), and a few others.
And that is in the end the point here. You use divisions that are useful, not that match someone’s sense of aesthetics. The same applies to time zones (though those get a bit obnoxious when politics interferes: all of China is a single time zone, for example, which is utterly ludicrous). Months are easy to keep track of when they match the moon’s phases. In pre-industrial times in specific that is very valuable for timing key things like planting and harvests. Only 29.5 days is the approximate length of the moon’s cycle, and the year is approximately 365.25 days long. So systems had to become entrenched that either used intercalary features (e.g. the Chinese solilunar calendar), that ignored the issue (e.g. various Arab calendars), or that disconnected the moon from timings (the Western approach). What is obviously not going to work, however, is to just pick arbitrary numbers like “six day weeks” from thin air (hint: 365.25 ÷ 6 = ?), or, even worse, “14 months of 26 days with one or two intercalary days” (what’s 26 ÷ 6 again, and what’s the impact of intercalary days on sliding across months?).
And to tie this back into your selection of 4241BC as the first year of recorded history … recorded how!? Writing was itself only only invented in 3300-3400BCE and the first coherent texts we have stem from about 2600BCE. So how are you picking 4241BC as the first year of recorded history when the absolute earliest actual records we have come from over 1500 years after that point?
Which highlights the danger of using “scientific” and “rational” starting points: they are neither. The BCE/CE system was based on the purported year of Christ’s birth which has two problems: 1. The historicity of Jesus Christ is very much in doubt, and 2. even if he did exist, that year is wrong according to later scholarship: if Christ were actually real, the reported fact that Herod was alive at his birth and that the Romans were doing a census puts his date of birth at 4BCE at the latest. (It could be as early as 7BCE.) Picking some arbitrary starting point based on purported scientific/historic “facts” will (not may, will) fall apart when (and not if) scholarship finds that the date given is wrong. It’s just better to pick a date, imperfect as the choice may be, and standardize on it than try to be “objective” and fuck it up completely like the BCE/CE system did.
The eight day system stands out though as it’s the Buddhist equivalent of sabbath. They valued lunar patterns (many went to their mass at night) and moon phases marked temple days, which they based an eight-day division on, while the weird daytime divisions were common in every culture until the clock was invented. The six day week is used because six is the most useful one-digit number when making unitary constructs, not so much with time in particular in mind (whether it divides into 365 was not contemplated anymore than whether the traditional seven does, with the earliest recorded year being rooted in archaeology, though yes it’s not unquestionable except for the fact that the next best conclusion I’m aware of would be that something like the Toba super-eruption should be the starting point, and there is difficulty in that).
The thing about aesthetics is, while things that are useful could be said to be anti-aesthetic, things that are aesthetic could be said to be anti-useful (think handwriting versus print; one is far more practical). Both may be satisfying, but only one can go places. Admittedly it’s a rough balance between natural and mathematical aspects of time, albeit it wouldn’t have it any other way.
serious question: do we know for a fact that that’s when recording started for some reason or is it just the assumption based on what we have discovered so far?
It’s most likely an assumption, but if it is, it would be an assumption that’s almost impossible to break, since this involves the self-awareness of records in an area known to have the first records and where those records wouldn’t have as much of a reason to be obscured. The fact that an exact date can be given also gives reason to wonder if there’s a good reasoning behind the date.
We don’t.
Writing was invented in the range of 3300-3400BCE and the earliest coherent texts of any kind we have are from 2600BCE at the earliest. We only have archaeological evidence of anything that happened before that, and there’s nothing special about 4241BCE in that record. (The nature of archaeology makes dating prehistoric things with that level of precision risible anyway.)
the reason I ask is that if we were to implement this date as a stating point for our calendar, further discovery of earlier records could make it just an arbitrary point. in which case, all the trouble that goes into implementing this change will be rendered pointless. I think it would be better if we picked a starting point that we’re certain of. any significant historic event would do, as long as we know the date wouldn’t change.
Lots of fun sounding ideas there. Only one I dislike is the 14 month with 26 days, since “letters of alphabet” is very arbitrary and biased to English. I personally like the simpler 13 month 28 days design, since that also equates to the lunar cycles used since ancient times.
But lunar cycles are 29.5 days, not 28.
It’s mainly for utility; in the case of English, it just fits. Any centralization towards one alternative isn’t intentional.
There’s actually an extra bit of commentary where different alphabets would be seen as fitting the solar cycles of different planets; for example Venus, with a seven-month system, would be associated with the Cyrillic alphabet in the same way. Likewise with Mercury (with a 4-month system) and the Hebrew alphabet, Mars (with a 14-month system) and the Chechen alphabet, and Ceres (with a 58-month system) and the Norwegian alphabet.
I just read your blog post and found it very interesting. I have to ask, practically speaking, doesn’t it just create more work for you having to keep track of the time and date in multiple formats simultaneously? When people give you information using standard time and date keeping metrics, do you just translate it into your system mentally? I’m curious how this system works for you practically on a day to day basis.
I mentalize both systems. Any difficulty is worth it since it has compatibility in mind. It’s the one I use in groups I administer because of this. Doing things the normal way, for a lack of better words, seems and even feels outdatedly/unthinkingly convoluted and skewed, as someone coming from several different backgrounds. The former is also less of a strain (both mentally/technologically) once one becomes accustomed, to put it one way it’s like the Lojban of timekeeping.
it’s like the Lojban of timekeeping.
Huh, TIL about Lojban .
So 6275?
Do we use AD?
Edit: Fucked up instantly realized gg
Yes, the year right now would be 6265 AR (AR stands for After Records).
I think we should update the calendar to start at the earliest known writing. Change it if/when an earlier example is found.
I think that would put the current year around 4,424.
No no no. I lived through the millennium. You’re not taking that away from me.
