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

[avram]

And we get to do all the Y10K debugging right now!

[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.

[shelly-rae.livejournal.com]

Can we start with the year 0? I like this idea. I'm one of those time-line fanatics (I do hope there are others) who keeps a time-time around the edges of my office. When I read something interesting, I note the appropriate dates on the time-line. It helps me to think contextually--to know what happened contemporaneously. For obvious reasons the Medieval Period in my time-line is much more filled in than other eras. My time-line starts with Homer.
Anon,

[avram]

You could try hunting around in the Wikipedia entry on Centuries. The 3rd millennium BC lists the earliest historical events (as opposed to volcanic eruptions, religious dates, or calendar start-points) pegged to specific years.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Yes--the first specific year given (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30th_century_BC) is 2925, "First Dynasty wars in Egypt". The only earlier events with specific years are the starting dates of ancient mythological calendars (the starts of the Maya Long Count, the Kali Yuga, and the Years of the World of Creation all in the third millennium, or Ussher's Creation of the World in the fourth millennium).

Calimac, a minor amplification: Joseph Scaliger was indeed looking for a calendar "year zero" which would pre-date all known events. The day he chose, the Julian date (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day) (4713 BCE) was chosen because it was the last convergence of three major calendar cycles--a 15-year Roman tax cycle and the 19-year lunar and 28-year solar calendar cycles. The first Julian Epoch will end in 3267 CE or so.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I was taught in school that the year Egypt was united was 3600 BC, and now see that date was 3100 BC. (http://www.kingtutshop.com/freeinfo/king-narmar.htm) Perhaps I disremember or perhaps the archeologists have changed their story.

How about Chinese history?

K.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

The question of when Egypt was united does raise one problem of a calendar system based on the first known historical events: if the dating is at all derived instead of given, further research could change that!

Recently, my 14-year-old homeschooler asked about A.D./B.C. One thing I mentioned, which amused him, was the idea proposed by some writers (largely but not all SF writers that the detonation of the first atomic bomb was such an historical change that it should be a second Year 0.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

One of my goals in choosing a starting date of ~8000 BCE is to massively predate any datable event. It looks like the earliest "events" which can be dated with any precision at all are at least 4000 years later than my proposed Year Zero, and it's also significantly earlier than any known calendar Epoch.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Something about Dick Clark?