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From: zonker@ihlpf.UUCP (Tom Harris)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Counting years
Message-ID: <681@ihlpf.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Aug-86 13:37:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihlpf.681
Posted: Wed Aug 27 13:37:30 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Aug-86 20:22:05 EDT
References: <1408@tektools.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 40

> In western culture, we count years from the birth of Christ.
> What event did people count from before that time?
> In other cultures (today or ancient) what events did people
> designate as year 0?
> I have heard that the Mayan culture 'count' was into the
> tens-of-thousands when they disappeared.  What conceivable event
> could they have been counting from?

The Mayan calendar was lunar, not solar driven.  The solar calander
was of little concern to them as they lived rain forests where one
season is pretty much the same as another.  If some one referred to
a very high Mayan calender date, I would suspect it referred to
lunar months not years.

As for Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans while they had city founding
dates (mostly mythological) commonly and in official documents
time was referred to as the year so and so was in charge.  It was
not until Herodotus started written history that anybody cares
to connect the various dates for cities together and even then
only the historians are at all concerned.  Note: the founding year
of the city had significance only to the various priests prior to
that.

I know that both the Isrealis and the Chinese have alternate
calender systems, but I'm not sure what they are tied to.

Even our own system doesn't get set up until several centuries
after the fact (I'm not sure when, but it has to be after the
Rome/Constaniople split).  This is one of the reasons that the
time 0 is off by four years (after six centuries people had kind
of lost count).  Note: 1BC is followed by 1AD there is no year 0. 
Further it is even more recent, say about the Renaisance, that the
majority of people had any idea (or concern) about what year it
was (plus or minus a century).  It took the rise of the large
banking houses and the modern buerucratic state before anybody
worried about tracking things over a suffeceint period of time to
need to number the years (secularly). 

				Hi Ho,
				Tom H.