It’s currently year 2023. 10 years ago, it was 2013.
What year was it 2023 years ago? Year 0?? What about 2024 years ago?
The Gregorian calendar system used by most of the world today can be generally divided into 2 major eras, labeled as CE (Common era, the one we are currently in, formerly and still widely notated as AD an abbreviation of the Latin “Anno Domini” meaning "in the year of the lord, because it starts counting from the supposed birth year of Jesus)
And prior to that it is BCE (Before Common Era, previously and again still widely called BC for “Before Christ,” because it was before the birth of Jesus)
There is no year 0, Jesus was (allegedly, I’ll touch on this a bit later) born in the year 1, and we kept counting up from there to the current year or 2023 CE (or AD if you prefer)
For years before jesus, we count backwards, so 2023 years ago would be 1 BCE, 2024 years ago would be the year 2 BCE (or BC if you prefer, one year before the common era/before christ) 3023 years ago would be 1000 1001 BCE
There are different calendars used in different cultures, religions, etc. that mark time differently, that may follow, for example, a lunar year (12 full moons, as opposed to a solar year which marks 1 full revolution of the earth around the sun) or may start counting from a different point in time. An example of the would be the Hebrew calendar which is used in the Jewish religion. It’s sort of a hybrid of a lunar and solar calendar, so a year using that system is slightly shorter than a solar year, and also starts counting from a point further back in time (3761 BCE is year 1 in the Hebrew calendar, and the current year is 5783, it’s used mostly for things like determining when Jewish holidays fall, which is why you may have noticed that Hanukkah is on a different date every year, and they don’t really have an official way of counting before that because that would be understood in the Jewish faith to be the date of creation when God created the heavens and the earth, not that manf modern Jews would take that literally)
As for the date of Jesus’ birth, most historians would tell you that it most likely wasn’t in year 1 of the Gregorian calendar. And we can’t really be totally sure of the exact year. No one started using the BC/AD notation until the 6th century and not everyone got onboard with it at once (it didn’t really get any widespread use until the 9th century) some monk in read the bible, compared it to some historical records, did some math, and decided Jesus was probably born 500 some years before, and probably missed the mark by a handful of years.
Prior to adopting this system, people would have counted years from various different points in time, and often wouldn’t even have a real number for the year, they might have refered to it as being something like “the 10th year of the reign of King such-and-such of whatever kingdom they happened to live in”
At any rate, years and dates are all pretty arbitrary concepts, we’re just slapping labels on it for our own convenience.
Damn, didn’t know a silly question could spark such a detailed response chock full of history goodies! Thank you for that.
I’m aware of the existence of different calendars but they are too complex to me since I (and likely most other people) already have the current calendar ingrained in us.
I’d assume the reason why we’ve settled on the current year-naming system was due to the prevalence (?) of Christianity / Catholicism?
Basically yes, but since I’m being thorough I’ll expand on that a bit.
The Gregorian calendar is named after Pope Gregory XIII, and first came into use it 1582. That, of course, is about a millennium after anyone first started using the bc/ad system of tracking years. So what calendar were we using before then?
And that would be the Julian Calendar, named after Julius Caesar, who of course predated Jesus by a few decades. The Gregorian Calendar is very similar to the Julian Calendar, the biggest difference is a very slight change in how leap years are determined.
The Julian Calendar was a pretty major reform of the older Roman calendar, which was a lunisolar calendar, making it somewhat similar to (but still pretty significant ly different than) the Hebrew calendar, and that reform is the reason that September, October, November, and December, are not the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year respectively.
So basically we use the Gregorian Calendar because Rome was a big deal back in the day and had influence over much of the ancient world, so most of the areas they had influence over used the calendar Rome used (or at least modified their local calendar to be somewhat similar)
Most of those areas also became christianized, so that’s why it was a pope who decided to tweak the Julian calendar a bit, and why we divide it up into eras around the birth of Jesus.
And those christian, formerly-Roman areas is basically a complicated way of saying “Europe” and the various European powers of course would, of course, go on to have a lot of influence over the rest of the globe and took their calendar with them.
This is all a bit of a simplification, there’s a lot of details I’m leaving out, glossing over a bit, or maybe even getting very slightly wrong because I’m no historian and I’m going more for a broad-strokes explanation instead of getting into the real nitty gritty details.
One small correction that 3023 years ago should be 1001BCE as far as I can tell.
2023 years ago was the 1bc. (using our coustomary calendar), since according to our calendar there is no year 0 (it was created before the introduction of 0 as a number). Instead, if you use the astronomical calendar, 2023 years ago was year 0
If you’d like a general timeline of the world from the beginning of time as we know it to now, I recommend this video.
There’s no year 0, it starts at year 1 CE (Common Era, you may also see this written as “AD 1”, Anno Domini 1). The concept of zero is relatively recent, it didn’t exist in its current form when this year numbering system was established.
If you go back one year from there you hit 1 BCE (Before Common Era, also written 1 BC, Before Christ) and start counting up one for each year you go back.
So, 2022 years ago is 1 CE; 2023 years ago is 1 BCE; and 2024 years ago is 2 BCE.
Does this mean that current year is technically 2023 CE and we eventually we just dropped the CE suffix?
That’s an interesting question and not something I think I can fully answer, but it seems likely.
AD did come first when the year numbering system was first created in 525 CE since the system was based on an estimate of the birth or conception (unclear which, there’s some debate) of Jesus Christ; hence the name “anno domini” (“in the year of the lord”). I’m not sure when BC was first used since that’s English rather than the original Latin.
CE (originally meaning “Christian Era”) wasn’t popularised until ten or so centuries later. It’s more popular now in part due to the fact Common Era is less overtly Christian-centric.
Interestingly, ISO 8601 (objectively the best and most correct way to write dates, fight me) doesn’t use AD or CE, the standard just counts normally. So you’d go from year +0001 (1 CE) to +0000 (1 BC) to -0001 (2 BC). I guess that means I’ll have to change my original answer; there is indeed a year 0 in the Gregorian calendar depending on the way you represent years.
there are two “groups” of years. CE (common era) and BCE (before common era, also known as BC for “before christ”). we are currently in CE. There is no year zero, so 2023 years ago would be 1 BCE, and 2024 years ago would be 2 BCE. BCE years count up as you move into the past, and CE years count up as you move into the future. when you see something referred to as happening in, say, 500 BCE, that is 500 years before the common era, or 2523 years in the past.
Would that mean 5 million years ago it would be 5,000,2023 BC or is there some other format for dates that far back?
When we are talking about years that long ago, we typically just say mya (million years ago or Ma for mega annum), or Ga for giga annum (billion years), at least this is true in my line of study, which is geology. As @fondots explained above, 1CE is considered the birth yeah of Jesus, hence years before the common era being called BC, for before Christ, before BCE became more common. Since humans (at least as Homo sapiens) weren’t around 5 million years ago, as geologists, we don’t really consider those years to be part of the BCE year group.
