Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 39

In 1854, scientists studying fossil skulls that were discovered in European caves, decided to name their subject Homo Neanderthalensis. Like 1492, when Columbus sailed, 1854 is AD, just like this year. AD stands for Anno Domini. That’s Latin for “Year of the Lord,” referring to the Christian era, or the time since Jesus was thought to have been born. Before that, years are designated as BC, or Before Christ. Historians now prefer CE (for Common Era) instead of AD and BCE (for Before the Common Era) instead of BC, for the obvious reason that a lot of non-Christians and non-Christian nations use the system. AD and BC, however, are what most people are used to. They’re widely understood and deeply ingrained, so I stick with them.

The years BC are figured by counting backward. That’s why the year when 32-year-old Alexander the Great died, 323 BC, is a smaller number than the year when he was born, 356 BC.

Yet Alexander never thought of himself as living in backward-counting years three centuries before Jesus. Our system of counting years didn’t come about until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII decreed it. Popes had that kind of power back then. Gregory’s system, called the Gregorian calendar, gradually became the one that most of the world uses to track appointments, supplanting older traditional calendars (and there have been many of them) for civil business, if not religious observances. The Gregorian system revised an earlier one named for Roman statesman and general Julius Caesar, which in turn replaced an even older Roman calendar.

In this book, you can assume that a four-digit year without two capital letters following it is AD. So, I may tell you that William the Conqueror, who ruled the kingdom of Normandy, successfully invaded England in 1066. For the years 1–999 AD, I use AD — for example, Norsemen invaded Ireland and began building the city of Dublin around 831 AD. I also include the initials for all the BC years. Examples: Saul was anointed the first king of the Israelites in about 1050 BC, and Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, the year before the calendar named for him took effect. (The reason why I say around and about for the dates of Dublin’s founding and King Saul’s coronation is that nobody knows the dates for sure.)

Another thing that may be confusing is the way centuries are named and numbered. When you see a reference to the 1900s, it doesn’t mean the same thing as the 19th century. The 1900s are the 20th century. The 20th century was the one in which four-digit year numbers started with 19; the 19th century was the one in which years started with 18, and so on.

You may wonder why this century, the one with 20 starting every year, isn’t called the 20th. That’s because theoretically, the first century (according to Pope Gregory and his advisers, anyway) began in the year 1. When the numbers got up to 100 (or, technically, 101), we were in the second century, and so on. Figuring the centuries BC works the same way (in reverse, of course): The 21st century BC is the one with years starting with 20, just like the 21st century AD.