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From: stirling@fortune.UUCP (Patrick Stirling)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Counting years
Message-ID: <6018@fortune.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Aug-86 14:24:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: fortune.6018
Posted: Tue Aug 26 14:24:23 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Aug-86 19:24:26 EDT
References: <1408@tektools.UUCP>
Reply-To: stirling@fortune.UUCP (Patrick stirling)
Organization: Fortune Systems, Belmont, CA
Lines: 21

In article <1408@tektools.UUCP> steves@tektools.UUCP (steve shellans) writes:
>In western culture, we count years from the birth of Christ.
>What event did people count from before that time?

I think Christianity was the first 'mass religion', ie the first to spread
over significant portions of the world. Before that I would guess that the
largest religion was Judaism - I don't know how they counted years, but seem
to remember that they have a year zero, and that it was a long time befoe 0AD
- perhaps the birth/death of Abraham or Moses (?). I think
that different cutlures counted years differently; eg the Chinese have their
own system (now in the year 4500 or so I think). The Romans dated years from
the 'crowning' of each Emperor. Islam was founded by Mohammed around 750AD,
and they have their own calendar, now in the 1300's.

>Is this topic of interest to anyone else?
Yes, definitely! Another interesting topic is, why count years at all? I'm
sure many cultures don't. Off the cuff, I would guess that it has something
to do with writing - recording events on paper rather than by word of mouth.

patrick
{ihnp4, hplabs, amdcad, ucbvax!dual}!fortune!stirling