THE WORLD’S MEASURE OF TIME.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20247, 16 July 1937, Page 6

THE WORLD’S MEASURE OF TIME.

In modern history, no less than in ancient times, attempts have been made to establish new eras by decree. There have been many attempts, but the world has passed most of them by. Nowadays, it seems simple to read that a certain event occurred so many years before Christ. In their computations, the ancients could not have adopted a computation of time which depended on some event the day or year of which they could not predict. There were accordingly many ways of computing time in the records of empires, peoples and kings who have long since vanished, and their eras have vanished too. As the ancients sought to value the events in their time and to impose their importance on posterity, and have failed, so have the comparative moderns. Posterity in fact, is the best judge of history, and with the possible exception of the Mahommedan computation of time, no era that has survived in the world to-day was practised until long after the event.

The Christian era was not adopted as a means of computing time until 532 A.D. Thus, the world had entered the sixth century after the birth of Christ before computations began to be made of dates in terms of A.D. or B.C. This era was propounded by a monk Dionysius Exiguns. It was adopted in Italy about the sixth century. It has become the most generally accepted means of computing historical events in the world. It is rivalled in the East by the Confusian period and in Islam by the Mahommedan era, but it has displaced all previous methods of reckoning time and it has overcome the several challenges made in European history. The Greeks reckoned time, in olympiads, periods of four years, but actually this computation had fallen into discard about 440 A.D., with the 350th Olympiad. The Romans dated their events A.U.C. (ab urbis conditae, or from the founding of the city). Roman history (except in its original writings) is not studied to-day in other than the Christian era. Tho Mahommedan era of the Hegira dates from the flight of Mecca to Medina on July 15, 622 A.D. The Mahommedan era is recognised, however, only in the Mahommedan countries, and even there it is often subordinate to the Christian era.

Modern history gives examples of eras set up vainly. During tho French revolution, a new era was set up in France by decree, but it only survived by a little, other innovations of the French revolution, one being the abolition of the Deity and the substitution, when the need for a deity became pressing, of the goddess of reason. The goddess of reason was later abolished, and the new era fell into discard too. More recently, we have the two eras of Lenin and Mussolini. Russia set up a new era with the revolution in 1917. It has not gained much acceptance. When Mussolini entered Rome in a sleeping carriage some days after his Blackshirts had marched on Rome, he set up the March on Rome as an anniversary from which fascist Italy should count afresh. The Mussolini era is not taken seriously, and there is little prospect of it enduring even in Italian history.

Posterity, however, is the best judge of history. Western civilisation has centred its computation on its religion, which in turn pivots upon the greatest event accepted by man. Nothing before has survived it, and nothing since has been deemed worthy of supplanting it. Certainly, no event in recent times can he adjudged worth while as the start of a new era, and in any case, historical examples have pointed to the inequality of man to the task of assessing the greatness of not distant events.