Whose millennium is it anyway?

Suffering from pre-millennial tension? Worried about the millennium bug? Wondering about where to spend the once-in-a-lifetime end-of-cen...

Suffering from pre-millennial tension? Worried about the millennium bug? Wondering about where to spend the once-in-a-lifetime end-of-century bash? All getting too much for you? The man to blame is called Short Denis.

The reason why the world is currently preparing to mark the end of the second millennium is that early in the sixth century, a man named Dionysius Exiguus Denis the Short, a monk and astronomer from Scythia, now south-west Russia, decided that a new calendar was needed.

While compiling a table of dates for Easter, he concluded that it made more sense to count the years from the birth of the Christian church8217;s founder than from the start of the reign of Roman emperor Diocletian, as previously.

His system of Anno Domini AD failed to catch on at first and was rescued from obscurity two centuries later by the Venerable Bede. The custom of naming years in the Christian era came into common use in ecclesiastical circles in the Middle Ages, but was not adopted for civil use until much later.Thus the approach of the year 1000 caused little fuss among the populace, who were still counting time in terms of the reigns of kings and emperors.

And the rest of humanity was advancing to a different drumbeat. Even today, there are about 40 other calendars in use around the world, all beginning at different epochs and with the start of the year occurring at different times. On January 1, 2000, it will be 7508 by the Byzantine calendar, 5760 by the Jewish, 4636 by the Chinese, 1921 by the Indian Saka and 1420 by the Islamic Hegira calendars. And while Short Denis claims the credit for laying the foundations for the first universal dating system, he is also responsible for two anomalies, one of which is of consequence to astronomers and the other of which is mainly of interest to purists.

Firstly, he left out the year 0 AD because the concept of zero had not yet arrived from the Arab world. He, therefore, counted the first year of the Christian era as 1 AD, with the year preceding Christ8217;s birth as 1BC. Astronomers are therefore obliged in their calculations to subtract one, so that the year 4 BC becomes the year 3.

A further consequence is that, as pedants are fond of pointing out, the end of the millennium occurs at the end of the 2000th year, not at the beginning, and the revellers on December 31 upcoming will be jumping the gun by no fewer than 365 days. Denis8217;s second error was in thinking that Christ was born at the start of the year now known as 1 AD. Modern research indicates that Christ was probably born between 6 and 4 BC, so that the dawn of the third millennium, technically speaking, is already a few years behind us.

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In compiling his calendar, Denis assigned Christ8217;s birth to the December 25 preceding January 1, in line with a Christian tradition arising from the Jewish orthodox belief that the real start of a baby boy8217;s life began not with his birth but with his circumcision and naming ceremony on the eighth day post-parturition.

As it happened, the Roman republic had been usingJanuary 1 as a starting date for the year since at least 153 BC, though the spring equinox on March 25 was widely used for the new year throughout Europe and continued to be used as such until the late 16th century. Scotland shifted to the January 1 system in 1601, while England plugged on with the March 25 new year system until 1752.

So much confusion cannot entirely be laid at Denis8217;s door and doubts remain even as to his name. Some scholars hold that 8220;Exiguus8221; referred not to his stature but to his modesty.