THE SELEUCID ERA AND THE ERA OF CHRIST: a time that once didn’t exist for us!
Seleucus I Nicator — a general under Alexander the Great, one of the Diadochi, and the founder of the Seleucid Empire, which lasted for about 250 years / wikipedia.org
We are used to living in the era «since the birth of Christ», which is also commonly referred to as our era. Accordingly, everything that happened before Christ’s birth is considered to have occurred before our era. For us, living in the year 2025 CE, this seems completely natural. But there was a time when humanity didn’t bother with strictly fixed dates at all! After all, time can be measured in different ways, since it flows not «on its own», but within history and culture. So where did our time — the era we live in — actually come from?
WHO SHOULD WE COUNT FROM?
O
riginally, the year for early Christians began with Easter — back in the 1st century CE, it was virtually the only Christian holiday. Other observances were added to the liturgical calendar as persecutions by Roman authorities intensified and Christianity gradually became a state religion.
Until the 4th century CE, Easter was celebrated at different times across various regions of the empire. That changed when Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea, gathering 318 bishops in the city of Nicaea. They decreed that church holidays be divided into movable and fixed feasts. Easter was designated as a movable feast to be celebrated throughout the empire on the same date — from then on, it was to fall on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox.
Interestingly, the council included not only Christians but also several renowned pagan philosophers. One might forgive the pagans for not knowing that the date of the council was reckoned from the birth of Christ. But how could Christian writers fail to notice the year 325 AD?
Take, for example, Socrates Scholasticus, author of the seven-volume Church History. According to him, the council took place «in the consulship of Paulinus and Julian, on the 20th day of the month of May, in the 636th year from Alexander, the Macedonian king». This single example already shows us just how winding the path was toward the establishment of a new Christian chronology.
Since ancient times, the reckoning of time varied greatly from place to place, with little consistency — left to fate or divine will. Sometimes, the starting point was a unique event, like a war or the founding of a temple. The years of a prominent ruler’s reign also served well for this purpose. But given the sheer number of wars, temples, and rulers, the confusion was staggering.
THE SELEUCID ERA: COUNTING FROM A BLOODY DATE
The chaos of times and dates continued until one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Seleucus I Nicator, brought about a revolution in chronology. After the death of his remarkable commander, he founded the Seleucid dynasty, which ruled vast territories stretching from the eastern Balkans to northern India. Rivers of blood were shed for this empire — the Diadochi, Alexander’s closest companions, showed no mercy as they ruthlessly tore his legacy apart.
In the spring of 311 BCE, Seleucus entered Babylon. This momentous year for the entire dynasty was declared the first «year of the Seleucid era». From that point on, a simple mathematical operation determined the timeline: the following year was the second year of the era, then the third, and so on. Strangely enough, no one had come up with this simple idea before.
The innovation proved so practical that nearly everything then considered the «civilized world» adopted this dating system. However, this universal, sequential, and irreversible principle of year-counting was ideologically charged from the start. After all, can the greatness of anything truly be recognized if it isn’t proclaimed the «beginning of beginnings»?
One of the first traditions to adopt Seleucus’s principle was the Jewish tradition — though only the principle itself! Counting history from the «Creation of the World» rather than from the first year of the Seleucid era was an act of profound Jewish patriotism. The Seleucids were openly disliked by the Jews. And who could blame them when Antiochus IV of the Seleucid dynasty, in order to fund wars and repay debts to Rome, dared to reach for the holiest of treasures — the treasury of the Jerusalem Temple!
As a result, the Maccabean War broke out, culminating in 101 BCE with the establishment of the independent Hasmonean kingdom, which was later conquered by the Roman Republic in 63 BCE.
SINCE THEN, EVERYTHING HAS ITS OWN DATE…
The Seleucid era gradually faded from memory… Yet, strong reasons to «reclaim» time in the same way continued to emerge. For instance, among the participants of the Islamic Hijra or the creators of the French Revolutionary Calendar. But perhaps the ultimate winner in this «calendar war» to this day is the Era of Christ.
Like it or not, all of us — believers and non-believers, atheists and pagans, Buddhists and Christians — essentially live within it. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. But at some point, history began to present itself to us as a single, universal, absolute, autonomous, and continuously growing number of years.
The historical time of peoples, nations, and all of humanity became synchronized once and for all and is now expressed solely in numerical form. And we no longer remember that, once upon a time, it could be arbitrarily tied to political events, conquests, or the ideological preferences of the elite.
Seleucus’s innovation led to everything in the world being assigned a clear and universally understood date — whether it was a jar of wine, a minted coin, a sent letter, collected taxes, tombstones, legal contracts, or payment receipts. Chronology and dating gave human culture something it had never had before: an organized system of interrelated, singular events. What seemed like a minor and insignificant innovation by Seleucus triggered a mental shift that forever changed our perception of time — our sense of the past, the present, and the future.
THE TIME OF THE APOCALYPSE
It was within the Seleucid world of relentlessly increasing dates that texts in the apocalyptic genre gained immense popularity — among them, the biblical masterpiece of eschatology, The Book of the Prophet Daniel. Earlier, predictions about the end of times were absent from the Babylonian kingdom, Persia, the classical Greek poleis, other Hellenistic realms, and Rome. The apocalypse is a creation born exclusively of the Seleucid era.
The eschatological worldview in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was likely influenced by the Seleucid concept of historical time. Eschatology — a term formed from the Greek words ἔσχατος (last) and λόγος (word) — refers to the doctrine of the end times. Indeed, everything in the world has a beginning and an end — an obvious truth that the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas offered as one of the proofs of God’s existence.
But for history to have an end, there must first be the idea of a point at which history began. Meanwhile, mythic time — in which the pagan world dwelled for millennia — was cyclical and fundamentally different from the linear and irreversible sequence of events we are accustomed to.
It’s worth emphasizing that the «imperial time» introduced by Seleucus was psychologically unpleasant for the subjects of the empire. Just imagine the ticking of the imperial clock: year after year, conquered peoples lived under heavy oppression. Year after year, their wealth and lives were taken, their cultural traditions destroyed… Surely, there must be an end to such a relentless and inhuman era!
THE TRUE MASTER OF TIME
How tempting it is to imagine that apocalyptic act of retribution — that long-awaited moment when the imperial clock, once set in motion by Seleucus, will be stopped once and for all by the will of God! After all, it is not the Seleucids but God who is the true lord of time. Thus, the political and ideological rejection of the Seleucid era by the ancient Jews evolved into something greater — a rebellion from the standpoint of eternity against time itself.
This is how, for the first time in human history, a sense of meaning and purpose emerged. As a result, the «text of history» was born. Like any work of art, it now had a plot and structure: exposition, climax, and resolution.
Could Seleucus, driven most likely by excessive vanity rather than a stroke of cultural genius, have known he was standing at the origins of a worldview revolution? Hardly. But the fact remains — thanks to his light, albeit vain, touch, we now live within a history that has both a beginning and an end.
Scholars, philosophers, politicians, and theologians may disagree on the ultimate meanings and goals, but few doubt that meanings and goals exist at all. Some await the coming of the Messiah, others — the Second Coming of Christ. Some have grown disillusioned with Francis Fukuyama’s prophecy of the «end of history».
And some shudder while reading Raymond Kurzweil’s predictions that in 2045, technological singularity will bring an end to humanity as a biological species. Oh, if only Seleucus I Nicator had been just a little more modest!
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