Standardized World Chronology

As someone who likes to occasionally dabble in the study of ancient history, I find all of those BC negative numbers immensensely annoying. It robs me of an ability to appreciate the time spans of things, in the way that I can appreciate the 1000 year difference between the end of the Roman empire and the stirrings of the Italian Renaissance. In BC terms 1000BC and 1AD is a muddled confusion, since there is that invisible border arbitrarily imposed, and as we all know, incorrectly, by the Catholic church.

 

Why can't the academic historians get together and work out some kind of standardized world chronology? Something that would cast ancient history into a positive scale of order. I've done research into this myself, for example, using the Roman Chronology, or the Egyptian in order to "get a feel" for the stretches of human history.

 

What I'd like to see is historians getting together at a conference and deciding on a particular day in ancient history when our international chronology could be established. Civilization is what, 10, 000 years old approximately? Shouldn't we keep this in mind, have some form of reminder, have an academic chronological system that would make this the 12th of February in the year 10,876 for example (I just made that up to illustrate)?

 

This is the year 2755 in the Roman chronology.

This is the year 6242 in the Egyptian chronology.

This is the year 5762 in the Jewish chronology.

This is the year 1421 in the Islamic chronology (changes over to 1422 on February 25th).

 

Using the Egyptian model as an example:

 

Socrates would have lived from 3771-3840

Julius Caesar would have lived from 4141-4197.

 

The first atomic explosion would have occurred in the year 6186.

 

As well, I realize that there are considerations that would make it somewhat inaccurate regarding the Gregorian and all that, however, what I'm proposing is a sort of Kelvin scale for chronologies - we all use Imperial or Celsius in our daily lives, but scientist use Kelvin to gauge the relative values in the scale. I can't imagine the Christian chronology disappearing anytime soon, since it has achieved a world wide infiltration (last weeks Israeli elections had a 2001 graphic instead of a 5762 one). And we all know that the Jewish and Islamic calendars are lunar, so they don't cross over very well into the solar.

 

So, in conclusion, what do you all think? Is this do-able?

 

TIMOTHY COMEAU