How do we set dates?

[staceyr]

How do we know when things happened say in 95bc...im sure they didnt date things "bc" because they didnt foresee the year of christ..or year 0! We have carbon dating for artifacts...but not for other info.

[Hammond Egg]

I don't know about other civilisations, but Rome used "Ab urbe condita" ("From the founding of the city") which was 753 BC in our calendar.

[jno]

other people used other counting systems (it was not uncommon to calculate things according to the reign of the current ruler) but we can count backwards and convert it into our own system. Sometimes we don't know - the reigns of many Egyptian pharaohs are still uncertain. There never was a year 0, but I've got lots of very valuable coins with 25BC stamped on them...

[THECORBYLOON]

Come on now jno, everyone knows there was a world shortage of gold and silver in 25 BC so I think someone must have fooled you...

[jno]

you could be right - I've always thought the portrait of Henry VIII on them looked a bit fake

[staceyr]

"thecorbyloon" how could something be stamped bc...when they didnt know it was bc? think you have fake coins..lol..thanks for adding some facts..I know how they do carbon dating and stuff..but i was stumped on how they would know certain dates...so i guess its basically guessing...

[THECORBYLOON]

staceyr I did realise that jno was joking (there wasn't a world shortage of gold and silver in 25 BC by the way.)

[dot.hawkes]

It is no longer BC and AD by the way , it is now CE and BCE, befocurrent era and before current era.

[dot.hawkes]

sorry that was current era and before current era

[THECORBYLOON]

As I've said before about CE and BCE, from what date do they calculate the "Common Era?"

[dot.hawkes]

lol i always call it current, ask my son, i drive him crazy!!!!!

[reinganum]

Sorry Dot I do not and will not subscribe to this politically correct nonsense.... BC and AD will persist for very many years yet because people have become used to them... and I do realise that Dionysus Exiguus got it wrong in the seventh century when the AD system was first used

Anyway, who decided it should be BCE and CE ? Names, please...

[reinganum]

Now, to answer Corbyloon's question.

Dionysus Exiguus (I believe I have the spelling right but am happy to be corrected) attempted to calculate the date of Christ's birth in the seventh century AD (as we now know it). However he got the date a little wrong (we know it is wrong for this reason, according to biblical sources): Christ must have been born during the reign of Herod the Great, but Herod died in the spring of 4BC so Christ must have been born before then, possibly as much as two years before.

There is an added complication: historians calculate BC dates on the assumption that the year immediately before 1AD was 1BC. However, astronomers call the year before 1AD year 0, because it makes calculations easier. BC dates are simply represented by negative numbers, so the eclipse which occurred at the death of Herod occurred (according to astronomers) in March -3

Astronomers on AB will no doubt tell me that they use Julian days anyway...

[chakka35]

Two things, reingarnum:
We cannot know when Jesus was born (if he existed at all).
The unknown author of Luke says that he was conceived during Herod's reign (which, as you rightly say, ended in 4BC) but was born during the census of Quirinius, which was in AD6, giving Mary a pregnancy lasting at least ten years!
The unknown author of Matthew merely says that he was born during Herod's reign i.e any time between 40BC and 4BC.

If astronomers really do call the year before AD1 the year 0 then they must be off their nuts. There cannot possibly be such a year. This is the confusion which caused millions of people to think that the 20th Century and 2nd Millennium ended on December 31st 1999, making all their celebrations a year early.

[jamesisgod]

Everybody knows the date was set by a man called Naresh Mesh Chand back in 1542, he decided he would use his hair to determine the location of the sun... quite a genious really. Really into his charity work too...