• PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
    21·
    4 天前

    Explanation: In reality, of course, Romans had their own dating system, typically using either the ruling consuls (elected officials) for the year, or, less commonly, the number of years since Rome was founded (Ab Urbe Condita, AUC). BC/AD wasn’t invented until the 6th century AD.

  • Ininewcrow@piefed.caEnglish
    12·
    4 天前

    I always found this fascinating … I think for the first thousand years, most people every where probably didn’t have any idea or clue as to what year it was. It’s a classic feature of time travelling fiction, if you landed in central Europe about a thousand years ago and you asked the average person what year it was, they either didn’t care, or just didn’t know.

    So it made me think … before the modern Christian based calendars … what or how did people imagine time in years or decades or periods?

    Even for the elite educated people who kept track of time … it was easy to track what time of the year any year was (you can just track the movement of the sun over 365 days) … but how do you determine which year it was

    • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
      22·
      4 天前

      “Back in my day, in the fifth year of our beloved Emperor Tiberius…”

      Regnal dating is very common across cultures! Unfortunately, it’s sometimes garbled in translation across polities, which rarely share the same rulers…

      • Ininewcrow@piefed.caEnglish
        19·
        4 天前

        In my own indigenous culture (we’re Ojibway from northern Ontario in Canada) … my parents and our elders talk about periods of a lifetime in terms of number of winters

        Like if you were to say someone was 20 years old … you’d say … ‘he is twenty winters old’

        Within a person’s lifetime … time was measured in seasons during the year … winters when measuring number of years …

        and like you said, periods over a lifetime was made in reference to a significant person … in our case, we measured it according to a grandfather/grandmother … or great-grandfather/great-grandmother … and beyond three or four generations into the past, things start to become legends and folk stories.