What is the earliest known historical date?

[womzilla]

What's the earliest event that occured in a specific, well-attested year?

What's the earliest event that occured on a specific, well-attested date?

Just wonderin', because of something I just posted to rec.arts.sf.fandom:

For some years, I've had an idea for recalibrating the Gregorian calendar with a year 0 set at about -8000 CE. This would have two advantages:

1. Every truly historical event would be in the positive range, so it would be easier to calculate timespans from the classical era to the current day.

2. 8000 BCE is around the time of the invention of non-nomadic agriculture, and seems like a much better marker for the beginning of history than a poor approximation of the fall of the Roman Republic.

Setting Year Zero at 8000 BCE has the tremendous advantage of simply converting common era dates to CE + 8000. There's a one-year tweak necessary for BCE dates, though.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, you could base your system on Julian Days, which begin in 4713 BCE, it says here, a date chosen IIRC because it gave all known historical astronomical observations a positive number.

I recall that Asimov says in one of his science essays that the earliest known historical event that we can pin down to a certain known day is a battle in Asia Minor that was - again, IIRC - sometime around 500 BCE. According to chronicles it was interrupted by a total solar eclipse, and we can figure out when an eclipse hit that spot around that period, ergo we know when the battle was.