The Man asked:


I know that now we calll it BC, for instance BC 431. But what was the reference before Jesus came, because at that time they obviously had no idea that he would be born on the Earth 431 years later. Does anyone know how they counted years?

5 Responses to “How did people count the years before Jesus?”

1. sparks9653 on April 20th, 2008 11:44 pm

   the roman empire

2. pike942 on April 22nd, 2008 12:03 am

   The most common method of keeping track of the year was to count from the beginning of the rule of the King, Emperor or leader of your group.

3. rdenig_male on April 23rd, 2008 4:00 pm

   This question has been asked many times here to my knowledge. It is obvious that they did not use ‘BC’ – that didn’t come into usage until sometime in the 4th century ‘AD’ How they counted depends on the culture they lived/live in. The Romans counted ‘AUC’ – ‘From the founding of the City’. Today, Jews and Muslims use different calendars – one is somewhere in the 5000s, the other in the 1400s. The Chinese have yet another calendar. For all I know the Bushmen of the Kalahari have yet another. We must learn not to be so Western-Christian oriented. For that reason I prefer the usages ‘B’(efore) and ‘A’(fter) C(ommon) E(ra) in place of BC and AD.

4. pepsi_chugger8899 on April 26th, 2008 11:15 am

   They didn’t count years- they counted days.
   they didn’t really understand astromeny before Jesus’s Time. That was more with the Mayans and Incans.

5. jamisonshuck on April 27th, 2008 9:23 am

   every civilazation did it differently. In Rome they counted years from the founding of the city which by our terms was about 700 BC or so