As the Christmas countdown begins, we will be running daily extracts from Barnaby Rogerson's fascinating Book of Numbers. Our advent calendar, appropriately enough, starts at the season's very beginning
Our western dating system – BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – Year of Our Lord) – was conceived in the sixth century by a Romanian monk called Dionysius Exiguus, and came into widespread scholarly use after its adoption by the Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede.
Prior to that, European historians dated years according to the Roman consul who held office in a given year. Working in Rome, Dionysus declared that the current year was AD 525, based on the birth of Christ taking place in the year 1 (there being no Western concept at the time of zero). Gospel historians later decided that Jesus was actually born a few years earlier, between 6 and 4BC. Dionysius, it seems, may have wanted to disprove the idea that the end of the world would take place 500 years after the birth of Jesus. That would have made it 6,000 years after the Creation, which was believed to have taken place 5,500 years before Christ. Dionsyius himself estimated, based on cosmological readings, that the end of the world would take place in 2000.
The CE/BCE (Common Era) designations, increasingly used to secularise history, are widely regarded as modern, politically correct innovations but were in fact introduced by Jewish historians in the mid-19th century. But, for those who might want an alternative, there are plenty of other dating systems. The Jews start their calendar in 3761BC; the Mayans, in 3114BC; the Chinese, with the start of the Yellow Emperor's reign in 2696BC; the Japanese, in 680BC; the Muslims, with the emigration of the prophet Muhammad from Medina from Mecca in AD 622; the Copts, with the Year of the Martyrs in AD 284, while the Ethiopian church starts the clock back in 5493BC.
Tomorrow: the Two Things game.
• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).
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