Damn, didn’t know a silly question could spark such a detailed response chock full of history goodies! Thank you for that.
I’m aware of the existence of different calendars but they are too complex to me since I (and likely most other people) already have the current calendar ingrained in us.
I’d assume the reason why we’ve settled on the current year-naming system was due to the prevalence (?) of Christianity / Catholicism?
Basically yes, but since I’m being thorough I’ll expand on that a bit.
The Gregorian calendar is named after Pope Gregory XIII, and first came into use it 1582. That, of course, is about a millennium after anyone first started using the bc/ad system of tracking years. So what calendar were we using before then?
And that would be the Julian Calendar, named after Julius Caesar, who of course predated Jesus by a few decades. The Gregorian Calendar is very similar to the Julian Calendar, the biggest difference is a very slight change in how leap years are determined.
The Julian Calendar was a pretty major reform of the older Roman calendar, which was a lunisolar calendar, making it somewhat similar to (but still pretty significant ly different than) the Hebrew calendar, and that reform is the reason that September, October, November, and December, are not the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year respectively.
So basically we use the Gregorian Calendar because Rome was a big deal back in the day and had influence over much of the ancient world, so most of the areas they had influence over used the calendar Rome used (or at least modified their local calendar to be somewhat similar)
Most of those areas also became christianized, so that’s why it was a pope who decided to tweak the Julian calendar a bit, and why we divide it up into eras around the birth of Jesus.
And those christian, formerly-Roman areas is basically a complicated way of saying “Europe” and the various European powers of course would, of course, go on to have a lot of influence over the rest of the globe and took their calendar with them.
This is all a bit of a simplification, there’s a lot of details I’m leaving out, glossing over a bit, or maybe even getting very slightly wrong because I’m no historian and I’m going more for a broad-strokes explanation instead of getting into the real nitty gritty details.
Damn, didn’t know a silly question could spark such a detailed response chock full of history goodies! Thank you for that.
I’m aware of the existence of different calendars but they are too complex to me since I (and likely most other people) already have the current calendar ingrained in us.
I’d assume the reason why we’ve settled on the current year-naming system was due to the prevalence (?) of Christianity / Catholicism?
Basically yes, but since I’m being thorough I’ll expand on that a bit.
The Gregorian calendar is named after Pope Gregory XIII, and first came into use it 1582. That, of course, is about a millennium after anyone first started using the bc/ad system of tracking years. So what calendar were we using before then?
And that would be the Julian Calendar, named after Julius Caesar, who of course predated Jesus by a few decades. The Gregorian Calendar is very similar to the Julian Calendar, the biggest difference is a very slight change in how leap years are determined.
The Julian Calendar was a pretty major reform of the older Roman calendar, which was a lunisolar calendar, making it somewhat similar to (but still pretty significant ly different than) the Hebrew calendar, and that reform is the reason that September, October, November, and December, are not the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year respectively.
So basically we use the Gregorian Calendar because Rome was a big deal back in the day and had influence over much of the ancient world, so most of the areas they had influence over used the calendar Rome used (or at least modified their local calendar to be somewhat similar)
Most of those areas also became christianized, so that’s why it was a pope who decided to tweak the Julian calendar a bit, and why we divide it up into eras around the birth of Jesus.
And those christian, formerly-Roman areas is basically a complicated way of saying “Europe” and the various European powers of course would, of course, go on to have a lot of influence over the rest of the globe and took their calendar with them.
This is all a bit of a simplification, there’s a lot of details I’m leaving out, glossing over a bit, or maybe even getting very slightly wrong because I’m no historian and I’m going more for a broad-strokes explanation instead of getting into the real nitty gritty details.