What is the earliest known historical date?

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.

Heck House

quility describes a very odd and upsetting documentary:

It's about this Assembly of God church in Texas that creates an alternative to the haunted house each October. They show skits of modern life horrors and how you have to turn your life over to Jesus to be saved - eternally and from these modern horrors. They change the skits from year to year but the year the documentary was made the horrors included abortion, AIDS, being homosexual, suicide, participating in the occult, drunk driving, drug deals gone wrong, date rape drugs, raves, family violence, and perhaps a few I'm missing.

and then comes away with a response which is just, well, wonderfully her:

Now I want to do a [Unitarian Universalist] Hell House. . . . So I really have to break it down to try to figure out what a UU Hell House would look like - a place that shows skits that try to encourage ppl to question world views that they have accepted . . . something that shows the perils of using scare tactics, something that shows the dangers of having a black and white world view, something that shows the dangers of not trying to understand ppl who are different from you.

And, of course, the moral hazards of running out of coffee. Yay UUHH!