That's the oldest message that we have today that is written in alphabet letters. It's inscribed on an ivory comb.
The NYT tells us the comb is from "around 1,700 B.C., " and I'm interested to see the survival not just of the comb but of "B.C." — rather than "B.C.E." — in the NYT.
I do a little research and dig up — not quite archeologically — something from 1997 A.D. (or should it be C.E.?), and I'm telling you about it because it's written by long — but not that long — gone William Safire, "B.C./A.D. or B.C.E./C.E.?":
As a White House speech writer, I had a hand in writing the text on the plaque marking the spot where Apollo 11 astronauts first set foot on the moon. To slip in an unobtrusive reference to God, I wrote, ''July 1969 A.D.'' When some alien from a U.F.O. lands there in a few thousand years, it will surely know that the initials stand for the Latin Anno Domini and get the point that our first explorers feared only God.
My mistake was putting the A.D. after the date. Correct dating usage is to put B.C., ''before Christ,'' after the year and A.D., ''in the year of our Lord,'' before the year.
Ah. So that's very interesting but not relevant to the question that brought me to the column. But Safire moves on, saying maybe he "goofed in more ways than one" and he shouldn't have written "A.D." at all, but C.E., "in deference to Muslims, Jews and other non-Christians."
He quotes Harold Bloom — ''Every scholar I know uses B.C.E. and shuns A.D.'' — and others.
Safire concludes:
Evidently many think B.C.E./C.E. is religiously neutral; others hold that the change is silly because the count remains from the birth of Jesus Christ and confuses those who think the C stands for ''Christ'' and not ''Common.''
Here's my take: I'll stick with B.C. because Christ, in American usage, refers directly to Jesus of Nazareth as if it were his last name and not a title conferring Messiah-hood. For non-Christians to knock themselves out avoiding the word Christ, when it so clearly refers to a person from whose birth we date our secular calendar's count, seems unduly strained and almost intolerant....
A.D. is another story. Dominus means ''lord,'' and when the lord referred to is Jesus, not God, a religious statement is made. Thus, ''the year of our Lord'' invites the query ''Whose lord?'' and we're in an argument we don't need.
I think "Christ" expresses as much divinity as "Lord."
And I think you should go one way or the other on B.C./A.D. or B.C.E./C.E. To split and go with B.C. and C.E. — based on the comparative religiosity of "Lord" is just bizarre. But maybe that's what the NYT has been doing all these years, and I'd never noticed.
Am I nit picking?
***
Back to the comb: The archeologist said "finding the comb with a plea against lice was like 'finding a plate that says, "Put food on this plate."' It’s simple, functional and reflective, in some ways, of our nature. It’s something very human. What were you expecting? A love song? A recipe to make pizza?'"
We find the oldest message and it states the obvious. So much for the deep mysteries of the past. They had a comb and it was a comb.
Posts
68 comments:
There's two eras, before Christmas decorations and after Christmas decorations, separated in the late 80s or early 90s when the company discussion boards were filled with the annual battles about Christmas decorations at work, argued by Jews rather than the irreligious. Muslims didn't figure in at all. Jews have a very high verbal IQ and a love of whining. The two sides were that Christmas decorations were fine and Christmas decorations were offensive, because Christians can argue too.
That's when BCE came in.
…’scholars’ that obsess over usage but have no handle on the facts, that is..
“They had a comb and it was a comb.” Well, yes; but that fails to emphasize how very special this comb was. Its makers could look into the future and see that Christ was going to show up in only another 17 centuries!
When you don't have plastic or cardboard, you put the advertising jingle on the item itself.
It’s haha funny the earliest preserved texts are things like instruction manuals and bathroom signage…
I'd bet that most non-academics interpret B.C.E as "Before the Christian Era" while C.E. is likely perceived as "Christian Era."
I don't like B.C.E because it drags out speech with an extra syllable. You only need a simple "pre" or "post" date indicator. B.C. does that well. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
A.D. is unclear for those of us who don't speak Latin, so no loss in changing it. At least A.D. and C.E. have similar speaking times.
Next, some tin-hat academic dictator will demand that we all say "information" rather than "info" and "air conditioner" rather than "A.C." because of...justice and technical correctness or...reasons...
Manscaping is big with the millennials. Went to an archery shop in New Hampshire last month looking for a replacement bow string for the old family Bear longbow. They only had recurve ready made strings and didn't sell string to custom make your own. But, they had a big center store display of beard grooming tools, beard shampoo, beard oils, mustache waxes, etc. Thanks to Christ who died for us so that lice would no longer plague humans.
Given Jesus was born sometime between 5 BC and 8 BC -- the bishop establishing the calendar of years missed an emperor with reign of uncertain duration, Common Era is correct. And amongst the Hebrews "Adonai" [="Lord"] was in use a thousand years before Jesus arrived, so using AD for our calendars makes little sense.
In most technical writings archæologists us BP [before present], as do geologists focusing on Pleistocene and Recent eras, but usually abandon BP at around 1 mya [= million years ago] and certainly by 2 mya.
Did lice dare to crawl into the beard of Jesus? Perhaps they were welcomed there with love and so behaved better and didn't cause problems like they do for people who hate them and want to cast them out.
Once I was talking to a young family member who indicated that he thought "Christ" was Jesus's last name, and I was embarrassed for him. But here's William Safire — whom I've respected and missed — saying "Christ, in American usage, refers directly to Jesus of Nazareth as if it were his last name and not a title conferring Messiah-hood."
Safire isn't saying *he* thinks Christ is Jesus's last name. He's just observing that masses of Americans don't know any better.
I would have thought anyone raised as a Christian would know. It may be relevant that Safire was not raised as a Christian.
The best choice would be GE ("Gregorian Epoch") with positive and negative numbers, including a year 0.
The calendar involved is the Gregorian, the epoch (start year) of the Gregorian calendar is only approximately the year of the birth of Jesus in any event, and including a year 0 both properly aligns when decades/centuries/millennia start, and simplifies the mathematics of periods that cross the date of the epoch. (Astronomers, one may note, already use 0 for what the historians call 1 BC/BCE, -1 for 2 BC/BCE, etc.; the historians can copy-edit the earlier dates while doing the switch to GE in their texts.)
The second-best choice is CE with positive and negative numbers, including a year 0, acknowledging that "CE" means the "Catholic Epoch", since the epoch was calculated and adopted by the Catholic Church. While not quite as neutral as "Gregorian Epoch" in simply identifying the calendar, this avoids falsely universalizing the epoch ("Common" implies everybody agrees on the importance of the start year, and the obvious alternative "Christian" is historically inaccurate particularly with regard to use by the Orthodox Church.)
Third-best is AD/BC, which at least has the weight of long tradition behind it, without the false universalization implied by "Common Era".
Use of "Christian Era" is certainty easier for the modern layman to understand than "Anno Domini" when using Pope Gregory's calendar. As a non-Christian, I find it not really offensive but a bit irritating to have the time after the birth of the Christians' god equated to the "Common Era." But as an American, I was born into a Christian country and culture, so it's only natural I suppose.
I watch archeology documentaries whenever I find them, and often they begin with a stern lecture on avoiding B.C. and then it will be as if they never said it, but I am sure that the younger ones will conform to the erasure of history by avoiding the terms.
Geology says KA, or thousands of years ago, but they mark it from A.D. 1950.
May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.
More statements of unhappiness by AOC?
I've had lice. An inscribed razor would've been a more efficacious tool.
Having the oldest known writing in the modern(ish) alphabet be a blessing for grooming is almost as good as the really oldest known writing being a recipe for beer.
I lose respect for people who use BCE/CE. Safire skirts around the reason and either doesn't make the connection or doesn't think it's as important as I do:
others hold that the change is silly because the count remains from the birth of Jesus Christ
We're using the same dating system, still using the traditional birth of Jesus as our before/after divider. We're just hiding that fact. That is, the one and only reason to choose BCE/CE over BC/AD is to hide information, to reduce the information content of our message. It is an attempt to leave the person we are communicating with less informed.
It's shameful that people who purport to be educated or even educators would embrace a system with that as its purpose.
"...as if it were his last name."
I miss William Safire. Those were the days I actually used to subscribe the The Times. Seems like another life at this point.
As for the comb, very human instructions and I find it almost reassuring that we needed these simple instructions or notes on common things. Or maybe there were bunches of law givers and law 'sheriff's around back then and just as a disclaimer they had to clearly state what the comb was to be used for. Much like today we need to print on the plastic that comes with dry cleaning to not wrap it around your head and tie it tightly. Maybe they had to list a disclaimer to block any liability to the comb maker in case someone shoved it up their nose instead and it got stuck. Lawyers, as it turns out, like cockroaches, have been around forever and will continue to outlive other species.
I will confess that just the other day I was commenting here, or somewhere else, and had the use the BC or BCE (or AD vs CE...I don't recall). My instinct was to use BC. But then I thought, Wait. Am I dated? Does everyone today use BCE?
It was the first time I had written it in quite some time. I wonder what people generally use these days?
Regarding the confusion of “Christ” as a surname and as a title (“the Christ”) I think it is natural enough. Particularly because so much of popular usage occurs as an imprecation —“Jesus [often with His middle initial “H”] Christ! [insert string of angry or disgusted profanities].”
I note this only as an observer, of course, never having taken His name in vain.
From the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th Edition:
Anno Domini (Lat., ‘in the year of the Lord’) The current system of dating by “AD”, based on the traditional year of the birth of Christ, was devised by Dionysius Exiguus (6th cent.). It is now commonly held that the actual birth was several years earlier, between 7 and 4 BC, since it is established that Herod the Great died (cf. Mt. 2:19) in the latter year.
Posting my flash impression in reading this.
"They had a comb and it was a comb."
I was listening to Stephen Kotkin talk about Stalin earlier this week, and they asked him what he had learned about why Stalin and his minions did the horrific things they did. His answer?
"They were communists."
I always though BCE/CE was silly as it seeks to avoid reference to the Christian Lord, yet then contends that the importance of Jesus's birth is "common" to everyone. There are, of course, many dating systems. If you are a scholar doing research involving Islam or Islamic countries, I would not expect that scholar to redefine the name used for dating the Islamic calender, Hijri. (Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Yathrib. This event is known as the Hijrah.) in fact, if you did, your reputation as a scholar would rightfully suffer. To arbitrarily change only the Christian calendar suggests prejudice.
"Am I nit picking?"
Nice job getting us back to the topic. That's your instructor experience kicking in.
I took a course on the history of mathematics at a Jesuit university. The first time the professor used B.C.E., he took the time to explain what it meant and why he used it. We were Math grad students, so he correctly assumed that some of us were not be familiar with the issue. I was disappointed with him and the university for accepting this academic affectation.
Sure, B.C. and A.D. are associated with Jesus Christ. Western civilization is associated with Jesus Christ. Using B.C. and A.D. is not a profession of faith, but a convention with Christian roots. Using B.C.E. and C.E. is a small, intolerant act that implies that religious artifacts must be rooted out of our culture, and has no obvious endpoint. Along with location names, the academics can surely come up with a long list of words and concepts that should eventually be repressed.
Randomizer nailed it.
The Secret secret is; that 'C.E.' stands for Christian Era, always has always WILL
People pretend that it stands for Common Era, but WHAT made it common? Christianity did.
Jimminy Crickets! everybody KNOWS that calling it Common Era is just because people don't want to say GOD's name out loud.
What is the event that begins the Common Era (CE)? Can it no be named, like some degenerate undertaking? Do we just pretend that person's birth is not a thing and call it CE instead of AD? AD is Latin for Anno Domini - The year of our Lord. So now we just tell him he is common, like a tramp?
I find the whole CE usage so funny, they trying to hide the event they are counting from.
I guess it's paleoclimatology that date KA from 1950. Of course they should base it on 1979, when the first decent measurements began in the satellite era. They could call it say 15K BSE.
CE, of course, asserts the primacy of the English language. The rabbit hole is bottomless. Better to have stuck with Latin.
So do we change Tyr’s Day, Woden’s Day, Thor’s Day, and Freya’s Day? I think the Moon’s Day, Sun’s Day and Saturn’s Day, although named for another set of gods, can be thought of as the planets that were also named for those same gods. Losing the history can be hard.
Randomizer @ 6:54: totally agree but I think your final sentence should be revised slightly: “…a long list of words and concepts [AND PEOPLE] that should eventually be repressed.”
PS: the Niall Ferguson video on Wokism is brilliant.
Time reference notations such as 'BC' are just picking the zero point on the time scale. Once can do this in any arbitrary way. For example, one could pick the zero point to be the year 2020, and then make a statement such as "the Republicans had a weak mid-term showing in the year 2 AT (after Trump)."
The fact is, the widely-used convention of using the birth of Jesus Christ as the zero-point was chosen and has been used for hundreds of years. Renaming the zero point from BC to BCE does nothing at all towards its purpose on the time scale.
If I had to nitpick about the use of 'BC/AD', it would be that we should pick one or the other, and only use that reference point (e.g., only use BC and exclude AD). After all, zero is only one point on the time scale.
And the philosophy of insects was born.
Sometimes a comb is just a comb
Unless you’re senator Klobuchar
Jesus [often with His middle initial “H”] Christ!
ha ha
Sometimes Jesus goes by his middle name, Holy Spirit
Christ is not his last name, of course, it's a reference to the spirit. Technically we only know him by one name, Jesus.
It's the same with the artist, Leonardo (I think).
Jesus of Nazareth
Leonardo da Vinci
It cracks me up all day to think that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guy got it right ("Leonardo"), and Dan Brown, the supposed historian, got it wrong ("Da Vinci").
I can't wait for his sequel, The Of Nazareth Code.
“May the lice of a thousand beards infest your crotch.”
—- Carnac the Ancient
We're using the same dating system, still using the traditional birth of Jesus as our before/after divider. We're just hiding that fact.
Cultural appropriation
Randomizer said "Using B.C. and A.D. is not a profession of faith, but a convention with Christian roots. Using B.C.E. and C.E. is a small, intolerant act that implies that religious artifacts must be rooted out of our culture, and has no obvious endpoint." I couldn't agree more. It's also used because it gives the user yet another chance to pretend that they are more virtuous than the hoi polloi.
@ Owen - You remind me of a story Mark Twain tells in Roughing It. He was working in a printing shop setting type. In an 8 or so page sermon, he set "J. Christ". His boss, furious, ordered him to "use His full name". That meant all the type after the first "J. Christ" had to move, 8 trays worth. So Twain replaced "J. Christ" with "Jesus H. Christ".
Did they eat their salads with that comb??
Roger Sweeny @ 8:45: Great story! I must read more Twain. A few years back I was given his Autobiography (more accurately the fragments of writing he had assembled in furtherance of an autobiography) and it had left me unenthused; but on reopening it recently I found fresh enjoyment in his sharp intelligence and superb easy style.
Before the Combing Era?
When one has a brush with such history it’s hardly nit picking to go over it with a fine tooth comb.
Maybe they thought the comb wouldn't work without the written incantation or would work better with it. Writing would have been like the metaverse then -- a new technology with limitless potential. What couldn't it do? Surely it could invoke the higher powers. And it must have been exciting to use the new technology to do something other than record how many bushels of grain the king had in his granary.
I don't doubt that most scholars use BCE/CE or that Harold Bloom approved, but when a nation or a civilization doubts its own legitimacy and is bent on self-destruction, isn't best to hold on to what you can from the past. Using BC and AD is indeed a sign of assimilation into an established culture, but was assimilation totally wrong? And have we considered the consequences of widespread non-assimilation? Maybe conforming in little things helps hold society together.
I'm using BC and AD because I'm not Jewish, and because its been the standard usage in the USA since 1609 AND in western civilization for 2000 years.
Why should I have to "Defer" to jews or muslims? Why did they come to a majority Christian country if they didn't want to abide by established cultural beliefs and norms? They don't use AD or BC in Israel or Iraq. If I moved there, should they have to change to defer to Christians and Europeans?
I'm using BC and AD because I'm not Jewish, and because its been the standard usage in the USA since 1609 AND in western civilization for 2000 years.
Why should I have to "Defer" to jews or muslims? Why did they come to a majority Christian country if they didn't want to abide by established cultural beliefs and norms? They don't use AD or BC in Israel or Iraq. If I moved there, should they have to change to defer to Christians and Europeans?
women really seem to love fucking around with the language. Its seems to be some sort of status game.
Since I'm an old fart archaeologist of over 30 years in the profession, one could presume that I'm an old fashioned BC/AD person. And one would be correct.
As others have indicated it's just a petty, vindictive way to get any sort of Christianity out of discourse, even though it's still using the exact same event as the starting point. Weirdly, some of the young bucks aren't even aware that the two terminologies are the same exact thing but with different wordings. Such is the state of education today. I read one article by an academic who kept trying to make the point that BCE/CE ("CE" - Common Era, btw, and it's been bandied about for decades) is actually more "accurate". No, duh, IT'S THE SAME THING.
On a heuristic note, I prefer BC/AD because they're easily distinguished when reading due to having two totally different letters; I do find myself often having to briefly re-read things to make sure I read "CE" instead of "BCE" or vice versa.
Besides, anymore no one is really thinking "before CHRIST" when they see BC, it's just a notation.
BP (before present) is used mostly prehistorically or when there's no historic record to match anything up with.
When I was a kid I thought A.D. meant "After Death"
not a Latin guy
The five finger rake, ten if you've evolved in the common anthropogenic model.
At some point some poor naive student will ask ‘why is year zero what it is?’ He will be ostracized and beaten int submission to not ask such bigoted questions.
B.C.
Before the Comb.
'Once I was talking to a young family member who indicated that he thought "Christ" was Jesus's last name, and I was embarrassed for him.'
Many don't know that Jesus' middle name was Horatio...
Balfegor said...
Use of "Christian Era" is certainty easier for the modern layman to understand than "Anno Domini" …
To not understand this, to me, reeks of an inadequate education. This is something one would learn around 10 or 11 years old.
But then, what do I know, I learned algebra and geometry, differential equations and other such useless things that would never apply in the real world…
When lice crawl into eyes from do they become more or beam?
Did lice dare to crawl into the beard of Jesus?
Of course! He was fully human. He also shat and peed and had to wash his feet. I heard he bled, too. Ask me a tough one.
Perhaps they were welcomed there with love and so behaved better and didn't cause problems like they do for people who hate them and want to cast them out.
You can have a fun debate with vegetarians about whether Jesus ate meat or not. Definitely a fish guy, or so I've been told.
In my apartment I am currently having a roach infestation -- my landlord is not happy with me, and I am not happy with my landlord, and the roaches are having a blast -- and I feel like King Kong, squashing those fuckers in the middle of the night. You know that expression, "He wouldn't hurt a fly"? For me, anyway, they say, "He stomps the shit out of roaches."
Honestly, I feel like the monster. When I turn on the lights, the damn roaches freeze, hoping I don't see them. I see you, motherfucker! And then they run like a little monster beast trying to escape. If I was writing this screenplay, I would definitely be the bad guy. And the roaches would be all, "We should be in the next Pixar movie, fuck the rats, man!"
If I was a better Christian -- and there are plenty who have me beat, y'all should know that by now -- I would find a peace of paper and put the roaches outside, where they fucking live or some damn thing, I see them out on the sidewalks too!
Here is Joe Rogan, famous atheist, with his awesome bee show.
I'm sure you think you've embarrassed the shit out of Christians by pointing out that we hate roaches along with the rest of humanity. You might have noticed that the elite atheist comics are kind of leaving the Christians alone, because Woke Shit is being indoctrinated in kids all around our country. But thanks for playing.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle guy: "The tough part is all the art research I have to do to get my turtles right."
Dan Brown: "What the fuck are you talking about?"
I wanted to chime in on the BC/AD versus BCE/CE. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Near Eastern Studies, most of my professors are Jewish, and BCE/CE is how I was trained. It's also normal in my field (Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East). I was a Baptist minister for 20+ years, many more conservative/evangelical Baptists bristle at BCE/CE, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
And of course Jesus wasn't born AD 1. I've attended lectures by academic astronomers explaining why he was likely born 6 BCE.
My guess is The New York Times went with what most people know best. That's why sometimes I use BC/AD, to avoid having to explain BCE/CE and why it's not part of some anti-Christian conspiracy. "Common" simply means "most commonly used". I once prepared an Conversational English lesson on calendars and dating systems, the "common" calendar system is arguably the easiest and most consistent there is.
I note this only as an observer, of course, never having taken His name in vain.
When I was a kid I thought this Commandment meant that you should say no bad words. And in fourth grade I would rate the bad words. (In seventh grade I would look in the Spanish-English dictionary for bad words in other cultures, you want to be careful with "puta").
Anyway, my list was something like this
dookie
doo-doo
hell
poo
damn
pee
goddamn
piss
crud
crap
shit
fuck
motherfucker
I'm embarrassed to say that "Jesus" and "Christ" and "Jesus H. Christ" did not make my list, because I had no idea these were bad words (i.e. blasphemies).
Anyway, now that I'm an adult and going to church and Bible study, my list of bad words have changed. When I drop a rock on my foot I yell, "God bless America!" When my brother yelled out "Jesus Christ!" in traffic one time, I quietly asked him if he could refrain from doing that. And he shocked me by apologizing.
Also the sin is in regard to vanity, not bad words. The danger is being vain or proud and thinking you are holy. Thus do not use the Lord's name "in vain."
Technically you could argue that "God bless America" is just as bad as "God damn America" but I'm not about to try to convince other people of that one. Positivity is nice!
I will also say that the more time you spend in Bible study and hanging out with Christians, the less cursing you feel the need to do. When you're in a spiritual place you don't get mad much. Y'all might be surprised but for a while the word "fuck" disappeared from my day to day.
To me it's a reference to human sexuality outside of love and marriage. Quite common in our culture. It's a huge (human) mistake to think that we should stop saying "fuck" and start aborting our unwanted children. The sin is to abort your children to hide your fucks. Anyway, I definitely curse a lot more on the Althouse blog than in life. Much of it is for comic effect.
One of our priests use to say "fuck" in his male-only Sunday school class, I think he was making a point.
"peace of paper"
I meant
"piece of paper"
Holy Spirit yanking my leg (again)
I'm trying to read Infinite Jest, and the zzzzzzzzzz'Year of Depends Adult Undergarments" chapter titles are still amusing, conflating the issues of how to name years and commercialization of all things.
And every so often even the wokest of PC editors will trip over their own dicks, as keeping up with the ever-changing rules of being progressively correct is hard, but remembering what arbitrary rule was instituted last week/month/year is downright impossible.
no one is really thinking "before CHRIST" when they see BC
unless you read the comic strip
Saint Croix: are you making a play for the mindscape occupied by Laslo?
Made me laugh, thanks.
X years after the big bang, plausibly. Inside the ouroboros, probably.
"That's why sometimes I use BC/AD, to avoid having to explain BCE/CE and why it's not part of some anti-Christian conspiracy."
Correct. BCE/CE isn't some anti-Christian conspiracy. It's based in anti-Christian bigotry, or at least the ongoing progressive and atheist-rooted academic desire to "de-center" and undermine the Christian roots of Western civilization. No conspiracy is necessary if the effort is widespread and mutually agreed upon out in the open.
Saint Croix: are you making a play for the mindscape occupied by Laslo?
Made me laugh, thanks.
You're welcome!
I loved Laslo, so funny.
I once did his schtick just to see if I could do it. I think he was really amused. It was one of the robot ones, I think. Artists influence other artists, for sure.
So the Canaanites had developed the expression "root out" in Canaanite in 1700 BC?
As for the comb, very human instructions and I find it almost reassuring that we needed these simple instructions or notes on common things.
As translated it sounds more like a prayer than instructions. Sort of a positive version of those great Yiddish curses, like "May all your teeth fall out but one, and that should have a toothache."
The Masons use Anno Lux-- year of light (but not light-years) from the Beginning, or we could use Jewish or Hindu numeration which start much earlier (but still arbitrarily).
Complaining about AD/BC/BCE is otiose. I use whatever I think my audience will understand.
As someone above noted, the inscription was likely a spell, not just idle words.
I'm using BC and AD because I'm not Jewish, and because its been the standard usage in the USA since 1609 AND in western civilization for 2000 years.Why should I have to "Defer" to jews or muslims? Why did they come to a majority Christian country if they didn't want to abide by established cultural beliefs and norms? They don't use AD or BC in Israel or Iraq. If I moved there, should they have to change to defer to Christians and Europeans?
I prefer A.D. and B.C. myself — and use them. It's worth noting in this regard, however, that “Christian countries” in general have not used the AD/BC convention universally (or “cosmically”), not even since the convention was invented (in the 500's A.D.), much less “for 2000 years.”
Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages (which are judged to have begun about 500 A.D.) and beyond, the medieval Roman Empire (often termed by historians the “Byzantine” or “Eastern Roman” Empire, but actually it was just the… Roman Empire) made little use of the western AD/BC dating convention, even after it was invented.
Instead, the Christian Roman Empire of the Middle Ages (and thus its modern religious descendants: the Greek Orthodox, various Slavic Orthodox, and other “Eastern Orthodox” Christian traditions, have traditionally) dated things according to the “Year of the World” (or “… of the Cosmos”) — labeled A.M. or Annus Mundi.
(To the medieval Romans — speaking [mainly] Greek — it was Etos Kosmou or the Year of the Cosmos, symbolized ε.Κ. A.M./ε.Κ. (a.k.a. the Byzantine calendar) was also the official calendar in Kievan Rus and Russia from 988 A.D. to 1700. The calendar made it's way all the way to Ireland! Moreover, the [Ecumenical Patriarchate: that is, the Constantinopolitan] Orthodox Church employed the calendar officially as late as 1728 A.D. — and it's still in use today in Eastern churches.)
A year A.M. (or ε.Κ.) is based on the count of (Julian calendar) years since the “creation of the universe,” according to the Jewish Septuagint Biblical tradition (which differs by more than 1,700 years from the modern Jewish date for creation) — occurring, according to the Annus Mundi tradition, on September 1, 5509 B.C. (in the Julian proleptic calendar).
As a result, it's now (since we're now beyond September 1 [Julian calendar], i.e., New Year's Day, for this year): 7,531 A.M.
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