A historical perspective
[skip the talk and go to the interactive bit]

What year is it really? Good question, it all depends on what you CHOOSE as your starting point.

One of the most widely used calendars today is the Gregorian, or Christian calendar. It's named after Pope Gregory XIII and was instituted in 1582 AD. As such the starting point is what church scholars believed was beginning of the "Christian" era. Other major dating systems are the Chinese, Jewish and Islamic calendars, all with different starting points.

Ethnic and religious groups tend to begin their own particular year count in honor of one or another secular or religious figure. This, pehaps deliberately, dismisses the importance of what has gone before and blurs our sense of history.

I believe it would be far better then to start the year count from the earliest known, reliably recorded date.

According to current theory, that point occurs with the start of the ancient Egyptian solar calendar. The egyptologist J.H. Breasted calculated that the ancient Egyptians made the switch from their older lunar calendar, to a better solar calendar, in the year 4236 BCE.

If we take this point as the start of RECORDED HISTORY (ie. the first accurately fixed known date), then what we curently think of as the year 2000, would become the year 6236!

A 'Recorded History' based year count would give us all a better perspective on how long humanitiy has really been chasing its tail.

PICK YOUR DATE

Enter a 'Christian' year in the box below (the year you were born maybe) and click the button to see the corresponding year of Recorded History (RH).

MORE DATES

As a special bonus enter a 'Christian' year in the box below and click to see the corresponding 'Chinese' and 'Jewish' years.