I just saw a video about BC/AD as opposed to BCE/CE and the invention of the Gregorian calendar and I wondered what year it would be if we counted the years like the Romans did.
I just saw a video about BC/AD as opposed to BCE/CE and the invention of the Gregorian calendar and I wondered what year it would be if we counted the years like the Romans did.
There’s a small problem in that blog: it has some grotesque inaccuracies.
The part that stood out for me, though, was this:
The ancient Chinese had a bewildering number of calendar systems with highly variable lengths of week-equivalents. They had 10-day weeks, 12-day weeks, 7-day weeks, 9-day weeks, indeed practically every number you can conceive of has been a week length in ancient Chinese calendar systems except—ironically enough—8-day weeks.
Incidentally, time systems in China are also horrifically complicated with divisions of the day into 15 “hours” (but only divided such during daytime hours) in very ancient times. Later a bizarre system that had daytime divisions of 10(更), 12(时), 60(点), 100(刻), 6000(!)(分), and even 600,000(!!)(秒) all being used at once was in play. (There’s a few more but i can’t be arsed to pull out my reference books; they’re used in marginal cases.)
Why so many units of time? Isn’t it irrational? Not really, no. Because differing activities had more useful divisions of the day for units. It turns out that consistency is very much the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s like how we use different speed measurements today internationally: km/h mostly, but also “nautical miles per hour” in the aircraft industry (alongside Mach numbers), and a few others.
And that is in the end the point here. You use divisions that are useful, not that match someone’s sense of aesthetics. The same applies to time zones (though those get a bit obnoxious when politics interferes: all of China is a single time zone, for example, which is utterly ludicrous). Months are easy to keep track of when they match the moon’s phases. In pre-industrial times in specific that is very valuable for timing key things like planting and harvests. Only 29.5 days is the approximate length of the moon’s cycle, and the year is approximately 365.25 days long. So systems had to become entrenched that either used intercalary features (e.g. the Chinese solilunar calendar), that ignored the issue (e.g. various Arab calendars), or that disconnected the moon from timings (the Western approach). What is obviously not going to work, however, is to just pick arbitrary numbers like “six day weeks” from thin air (hint: 365.25 ÷ 6 = ?), or, even worse, “14 months of 26 days with one or two intercalary days” (what’s 26 ÷ 6 again, and what’s the impact of intercalary days on sliding across months?).
And to tie this back into your selection of 4241BC as the first year of recorded history … recorded how!? Writing was itself only only invented in 3300-3400BCE and the first coherent texts we have stem from about 2600BCE. So how are you picking 4241BC as the first year of recorded history when the absolute earliest actual records we have come from over 1500 years after that point?
Which highlights the danger of using “scientific” and “rational” starting points: they are neither. The BCE/CE system was based on the purported year of Christ’s birth which has two problems: 1. The historicity of Jesus Christ is very much in doubt, and 2. even if he did exist, that year is wrong according to later scholarship: if Christ were actually real, the reported fact that Herod was alive at his birth and that the Romans were doing a census puts his date of birth at 4BCE at the latest. (It could be as early as 7BCE.) Picking some arbitrary starting point based on purported scientific/historic “facts” will (not may, will) fall apart when (and not if) scholarship finds that the date given is wrong. It’s just better to pick a date, imperfect as the choice may be, and standardize on it than try to be “objective” and fuck it up completely like the BCE/CE system did.
The eight day system stands out though as it’s the Buddhist equivalent of sabbath. They valued lunar patterns (many went to their mass at night) and moon phases marked temple days, which they based an eight-day division on, while the weird daytime divisions were common in every culture until the clock was invented. The six day week is used because six is the most useful one-digit number when making unitary constructs, not so much with time in particular in mind (whether it divides into 365 was not contemplated anymore than whether the traditional seven does, with the earliest recorded year being rooted in archaeology, though yes it’s not unquestionable except for the fact that the next best conclusion I’m aware of would be that something like the Toba super-eruption should be the starting point, and there is difficulty in that).
The thing about aesthetics is, while things that are useful could be said to be anti-aesthetic, things that are aesthetic could be said to be anti-useful (think handwriting versus print; one is far more practical). Both may be satisfying, but only one can go places. Admittedly it’s a rough balance between natural and mathematical aspects of time, albeit it wouldn’t have it any other way.