Before Christ was born, what did people use to measure time ? They did not know it was eg. 55 BC?

Answer 1

In ancient Rome, it was a common practice to denote each year by the two consuls who were elected to office for a year. This is commonly referred to as consular dating.

There was also a Roman calendar which consisted of 12 months, but totaling in 355 days; subsequently, a 27-day intercalary month was added occasionally to keep the calendar aligned with the tropical year. However, this system easily went out of alignment since the intercalary month was omitted frequently.

The Roman calendar would be replaced by the Julian Calendar, which was instituted by Julius Caesar.

Answer 2

Luke tells us that at the time Jesus was born, Quirinus of the governor for the first time and Herod the Great was alive. Monks in the Middle Ages (when the division was first created) did not have a records to show them when Herod died, and only records that showed when Quirinus was governor the second time. They set the date based on when Quirinus was governor the second time. Since then, additional discoveries have documented that Herod the Great died in the spring of 4 BC, and Quirinus was governor the first time from 6 to 4 BC. When the monks created the original division (600 years after the actual birth), they were wrong on the date the selected. But at that time it had been in use for several hundred years so they never bothered to correct the error. So the date is off by somewhere between 4 and 6 years.

Answer 3

Have you ever heared of the Julian Calendar. It was introduced in 46 B.C. by Julius Caesar. It calculated time since the foundation of Rome "Ab Urbe Condita"~~~753 B.C. The Julian Calendar had a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months, and a leap day was added to February every four years. Hence the Julian year was on average 365.25 days long.

We currently use the Gregorian Calendar, a revised replica of Caesar's Calendar.

Answer 4

Well, the Jewish Calender began with the creation of Adam and Eve som 5,776 years ago. As far as other civilizations, they all had different ways of counting the years.

For a nice list of different calenders used, see...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era

EDIT: Actually, Rome used AUC (Ab Urbe Condita) which means "from the founding of the city". 1 AD for romans was 754 AUC. The xth year of the reign of maximus was not very practical since some years witness numerous emporers come and go.

Answer 5

"B.C" (Before Christ) and "A.D" (Anno Domini, or Year of our Lord) are only fairly recent methods for ascribing years. The term "Anno Domini" was created by a monk in order to calculate the date of Easter. This is quite a bit of complicated business, involving a lot of calculation, re-calculation, and fiddling around with calendars and such, so I will not get into it.

Lately, though, there are quite a few historians who do not use the terms B.C and A.D. anymore, because of its connections of Christianity, and hence, lack of political correctness. After all, what sort of significance do those terms have to a Muslim or a Buddhist? To solve that, contemporary historians have begun to use the designation "B.C.E" (Before Current Era) in place of "B.C.," and "C.E." (Current Era) in place of A.D.

Pardon the digression. To answer your question, every civilization had their own way of measuring the years - some as simple as counting the cycle of the seasons, while others used more complicated methods of measuring the passage of years. The Romans (Julius Caesar, in particular) can be credited for the creation of the calendar as we know and use it today. The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans used the lunar cycles as the basis for their calendar - and still do, since many of their important holidays rely on the lunar calendar (this is why the Chinese New Year is celebrated during a particular week in February, with no specific date save for whichever week the moon happens to be in the right phase during that month). The Mayans of South America were said to have created a very complex calendar that followed the movements of not just the sun and the moon, but other planets like Venus.

As for naming those years...well, that certainly depended on the civilization in question. Some - China and Japan in particular, if I am not mistaken - counted the passage of time in terms of the reigns of their rulers. For example: "Year Two in the Reign of Emperor Wai Bing." When that Emperor died, they started back at "Year One" of his successor.

Answer 6

For the Chinese they calculated with a lunar calendar which i think is more accurate than the solar calendar. I think they used the time frame in reference to their emperor during a dynasty, so do the Japanese and other countries who did not have Jesus Christ as a point of reference.

B.C. is before christ and A.D. is Anno Domini or "year of our lord."

Answer 7

They used to count Olympiads and governors. i.e. third year after the 127th Olympiad when governor was,,,Blablabla.

Considering that the first Olympiad was (as starting point 776 BC), we can calculate what year BC was it.:)

Answer 8

There was a calendar dated to 4241 (before the Christian Era) in ancient Egypt. The calendar at various periods were maintained by the priests of the temples.

Answer 9

Different cultures used different methods. The Romans measured it by the year of the reign of the emporer, such as the third year of the reign of Julius Caesar. Some cultures still use different years.

Answer 10

in rome they used to measure time with the person that was in office, like, ''in the third year of maximum decimus meridium as governor had occurred........''