skulls that were discovered in European caves, decided to name their subject Homo Neanderthalensis. Like 1492, when Columbus sailed, 1854 is AD, just like this year. AD stands for Anno Domini. That’s Latin for “Year of the Lord,” referring to the Christian era, or the time since Jesus was thought to have been born. Before that, years are designated as BC, or Before Christ. Historians now prefer CE (for Common Era) instead of AD and BCE (for Before the Common Era) instead of BC, for the obvious reason that a lot of non-Christians and non-Christian nations use the system. AD and BC, however, are what most people are used to. They’re widely understood and deeply ingrained, so I stick with them.
The years BC are figured by counting backward. That’s why the year when 32-year-old Alexander the Great died, 323 BC, is a smaller number than the year when he was born, 356 BC.
Yet Alexander never thought of himself as living in backward-counting years three centuries before Jesus. Our system of counting years didn’t come about until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII decreed it. Popes had that kind of power back then. Gregory’s system, called the Gregorian calendar, gradually became the one that most of the world uses to track appointments, supplanting older traditional calendars (and there have been many of them) for civil business, if not religious observances. The Gregorian system revised an earlier one named for Roman statesman and general Julius Caesar, which in turn replaced an even older Roman calendar.
In this book, you can assume that a four-digit year without two capital letters following it is AD. So, I may tell you that William the Conqueror, who ruled the kingdom of Normandy, successfully invaded England in 1066. For the years 1–999 AD, I use AD — for example, Norsemen invaded Ireland and began building the city of Dublin around 831 AD. I also include the initials for all the BC years. Examples: Saul was anointed the first king of the Israelites in about 1050 BC, and Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, the year before the calendar named for him took effect. (The reason why I say around and about for the dates of Dublin’s founding and King Saul’s coronation is that nobody knows the dates for sure.)
Another thing that may be confusing is the way centuries are named and numbered. When you see a reference to the 1900s, it doesn’t mean the same thing as the 19th century. The 1900s are the 20th century. The 20th century was the one in which four-digit year numbers started with 19; the 19th century was the one in which years started with 18, and so on.
You may wonder why this century, the one with 20 starting every year, isn’t called the 20th. That’s because theoretically, the first century (according to Pope Gregory and his advisers, anyway) began in the year 1. When the numbers got up to 100 (or, technically, 101), we were in the second century, and so on. Figuring the centuries BC works the same way (in reverse, of course): The 21st century BC is the one with years starting with 20, just like the 21st century AD.
Dividing Time into Eras … and Giving Them Names
If history teachers told you that medieval means the period between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Renaissance (the 14th century), you could have thrown the author H.G. Wells at them.
Not literally, of course. (Let Mr. Wells rest in peace.) Yet it may surprise students of history and certain teachers to find out that historians disagree about when the period called medieval began. Wells (1866–1946) is better remembered today as a pioneering science-fiction writer, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds (1898), but he also wrote a three-volume Outline of History (1920). He begins the second volume of this major history of the world, called Medieval History, at 300 BC with the rise, not the fall, of Rome’s empire.
So what? That’s my point. Wells’s work is just one illustration of the fact that history is full of periods divided by arbitrary lines etched in the shifting sands of time.
Sorting ancient from modern
“That’s ancient history, Pops.” In American movies from the 1930s through the 1950s, a teenage character often says something like that to an adult, thus dismissing an event that the adult remembers as being too long ago to matter. Ancient is another relative term, like recent, modern, and medieval. To a person born in 2021, the teenager in that 1950s movie will seem beyond ancient.
Telling classical from schmassical
Classical is another historical label that can have different meanings in different contexts. The classical period in European music, for example, was about 1750 to 1820, but people who study the Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula refer to a classical historical period of about 250–900 AD.
One of the best-known uses of the term classical applies to the years 479–323 BC in the southern Balkan Peninsula of Eastern Europe. That period was a particularly influential era of Greek culture: Classical Greece (with a capital C).
Traditionally, many historians have hailed the Classical Greeks as being the founders of Western civilization’s core values: rationality, freedom of debate, individuality, and democracy. These concepts did arise and gain acceptance during that time, yet the Greece of the time was hardly an ideal society. Greek cities often fought wars against one another, and in addition to creating enduring ideas, they hatched some notions that sound quite peculiar today. In Aristotle’s time (the fourth century BC), for example, one could argue that women were “failed men,” a lesser rendering of the same biological pattern as males. Yikes!
The Greek city–state Athens is often cited as a model for modern democracies, but there are huge differences between the Greeks’ notion of democracy and today’s. In Athens, maybe 30 percent of the population at most were citizens, and all citizens were men.
Historians constantly reevaluate the past. As scholars reinterpret the period, the term Classical may no longer be helpful for understanding the years 479–323 BC in Greece. And you know what? That’s okay. You can look at the Greeks from any number of angles, and they don’t get any less fascinating.
Bowing to the queens
Scholars also name eras and periods for notable events or people, such as Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. In the Western Hemisphere, times before that event are frequently called pre-Columbian. A period label is often based on the reign of a monarch, such as England’s Elizabeth I (before there was a United Kingdom). Events, fashions, and literature from her reign (1558–1603, a golden age of English culture) carry the designation Elizabethan. A label may cover much longer periods, as when they derive from Chinese dynasties. The Ming Dynasty, for example, ruled from 1368–1644.
For a cinematic depiction of England’s Elizabethan era, you can check out 1998’s Elizabeth and its 2007 sequel,
