Archive for August 2009

From the Wikipedia article on ‘The Holocene Calendar‘: Cesare Emilian’s proposal published in Nature in 1993:

Calendar reform
SIR – Jews reckon time from the biblical creation of the world (set at 3761 BC); the Romans from the founding of Rome; and the Moslems since the Hegira (AD 622). In AD 526, the Emperor Justinian introduced the current system of reckoning time from the birth of Christ, set at 753 AUC (ab urbe condita, “since the founding of Rome”) by the monk Dionysius Exiguus.

In the BC/AD system that Justinian introduced, the numbering of years is ordinal, not cardinal; there is no year zero; and the numbers increase in opposite directions (whereas time flows in the same direction). As a result, time intervals across the BC/AD boundary cannot be calculated algebraically – the time interval between 1.5 BC and AD 1.5 is one year, not three years. As well as being inconvenient to those who deal with history and ancient human events, the BC/AD way of reckoning years singles out an event – the birth of Christ – that has no significance to many civilizations.

I propose that the beginning of calendrical time could be set at the beginning of the current Julian cycle (12.00 noon Greenwhich mean time, 4713 BC), established in 1582 by Joseph Scaliger and still used by astronomers. A constant – 4,713 years – would then have to be added to the AD dates and the BC dates would have to be subtracted from 4714 (the Scaliger year equivalent to AD 1). (To simplify the arithmetic, a round unit such as 10,000 years could be added to the AD dates instead).

Setting the birth of Christ at 25 December of the year 10,000 from the beginning of what could be appropriately called the “human era”, would make the year AD 1 into the year 10,001 and the year 1 BC into the year 10,000. All BC dates would thus be subtracted from 10,001.

Setting the beginning of the human era at 10,000 BC would date the first year of Scaliger’s Julian period at the year 5288; the beginning of the Egyptian calendar (4241 BC) at the year 5760; the foundings of Rome at 9248; the birth of Christ at 10,000, the fall of the Roman Empire at 10,476, the French Revolution at 11,789 and the present year (1993) at 11,993. I suggest that the new calendar is adopted in the year 2000 (new year 12,000).

Cesare Emiliani
Department of Geological Sciences,
University of Miami,
Coral Gables,
Florida 33124, USA

Nature, Vol 366, 23/30 December 1993