Please explain my confused me like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).
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Years exist. We decide what to call them. You and I agree to call this year 2024, but that’s only an agreement. Some people call this year 5784.
We call the system we use “The Gregorian Calendar”, because of a Pope named Gregory. That system is mostly the same as “The Julian Calendar”, with some important changes to make the calendar match the changing of the seasons better. In the Julian calendar, they decided to count the years starting from when they thought Jesus was born. They chose his birth year to be “The first year of our Lord”. We call that “year 1” for short.
The people who created that system (the Julian Calendar) didn’t understand 0. The year before “The first year of our Lord” was called “The first year before the birth of Christ”. We now call these “AD 1” (“anno domini”, because Latin) and “1 BC” (“before Christ”). Since they didn’t understand 0, they didn’t call any year “0”. We have kept the tradition, because reasons.
Some other systems have relabeled the year before “AD 1” as year 0, but that’s not how the Gregorian Calendar works, and that’s the calendar that you and I have been taught to use.
“They,” i.e. the catholic church, or whoever was tasked with coming up with a calendar, absolutely understood the concept of zero in the 1500’s. Yes, Zero took a bit longer to formalize and enter the zeitgeist of the public consciousness, but this myth of zero being some kind of unknowable thing for thousands of millennia is naive.
I’d go so far as to say that a year zero in a calendar is useless. There should be a starting point of course, but calling it yero zero instead of year 1 is dumb.
By that part, I was referring to the people establishing the Julian Calendar, not the Gregorian. I’ve edited my comment to clarify that.
But you are missing the point,. There is no reason to ever start a calendar at year zero. The starting point can be zero, fine, but once the first day goes by, you are in the first day of year 1, not year zero and that is logical and has nothing to do with smart astronomers etc, “not understanding the number zero.”
At this point I’d say the only person who doesn’t understand zero is you.
It makes sense to start with the year zero when you want to do any calculations that involve dates that where before and after year one. If an empire was founded in 50 BC and dissolved in 50 CE to calculate its age when it was dissolved you have to acknowledge that there is no year zero so instead of just calculating 50 - (-50) = 100 you have to substract one which is counter intuitive. Because it went from year 1 BC straight to 1 CE.
I’m no expert but I assume that the year Christ died would be “year zero” (assuming you’re talking about anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC)) since we started counting after that.
EDIT: reading more on the topic I might be completely incorrect with my above statement. If someone else knows, please do correct me
EDIT 2: I found this on Wikipedia which talks about a “year zero”
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When you consider the time as a number line, years are not points at integers (which would in some way warrant a year 0), but rather periods between them. Year 1 is the period between 0 and 1, and before that was -1 to 0, or year -1. There is no year 0, because there isn’t anything between 0 and 0
This explanation is unclear to me. Why do we choose the later of the two endpoints of the year for (0, 1) but the earlier of the two for (-1, 0)?
Because until the Middle Ages, Europeans were afraid of the number 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
The year of Jesus’ supposed birth was counted as year 1 AD/CE. The year before that is considered year 1 BC/BCE. It’s worth noting that the concept of zero didn’t yet exist back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#History
Probably worth noting that the Gregorian Calendar was an invention of the 16th Century. It was invented to deal with the problems of the Julian Calendar and the creators would have had a firm understanding of the concept of zero. The AD/BC split was all about the assumed year of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (according to Christian mythology). The year of his birth was set as the first year Anno Domini or “The year of the Lord”. Or the first year where Jesus was kicking about. The year prior to that would therefore be the first year before “Before Christ” was alive, and therefore the year 1 BC.
Especially weird considering that Christmas has been set to December for a long time, so 98% of year 1 AD was actually before the ostensible birth of Christ (I know that scholars now think he was born in April or something, but they probably didn’t always)
