A better time, a better history - part 1

We want to know where we go. We plan and make things in the future dependent on choices we make now. This isn't really what we choose, but simply causality. This has been going on for millenia. Painful thing is, we are now stuck with an unrealistic timeframe of 2016 years, from some arbitrary date, which is chosen by a group that had only one motive: control, and is only based on a lie (religion). As humanity will eventually outgrow its own superstition, I don't think Year 1 at the date of a person that didn't exist, makes sense. We know for instance that the oldest written proza is from 2150 years earlier. Why not use that? Make it 4716 AG (After Gilgamesh), which is a more solid calculation, not chosen on whim of some arbitrary group that wants their fantasy to hold truth by it, but simply because we (as humanity globally) know this dating is more correct.

But it isn't very solid to say 2700 added, because the dating says the earliest preserved version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was written 2150-1400 BCE, but seemingly he was ruler several hundreds of years before.
True, but the oldest date calculated remains pretty fixed. It is the dawn of humanity as we are currently part of. It is a beginning of causality that lead to us, as a species of 6+ billion individuals.

There are many options, but I think it becomes more and more important to change the dating and seasonal shifts to the observed, rather than the obscured.

A year should start (as it does in other cultures) on a globally distinct moment. An equinox or solstice is most obvious choice here. You can choose to take the first day of a 'blooming' around 21st of march (when the darkness has resided), or the moment that days are shortest (around 21st of December) and moving towards lighter times, or visa versa (21st of June).

Also, the month periods have been under scrutiny for a long time. We are using a month index that is cumbersome. We could change the naming of the months, but at least the starting of the years should move.

Basically we have 4 shifts of axis. 2 equinox, 2 solstice.

If 1 of the 4 is the beginning of the year, the rest would cut the year in 4 (as we know seasons do). This is the same, all around the world, but the kind of season depends on the location (southern hemisphere is summer, when northern is winter and visa versa).

Interesting info from Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19pgf6/what_is_the_earliest_recorded_date_that_we_can/

hpliferaft 33 punten 3 jaar geleden 

The fortune (or curse) of writing is that it has radically changed how humans understand time, because we can externalize our knowledge.

Since our knowledge isn't bound in stories that we hear around the campfire, we can now understand that there is a past and a future that can be measured in data, as opposed to anecdotal or mythic experience. Before writing, it was difficult for a community to remember a past that was not experienced by its oldest members. After a while, such stories turned to myths. (An obvious example of time in myth is the creation in Genesis, which measures the creation of the world in days, which was a mythical unit that made sense to people at the time of its perpetuation.)

Pre-literary communities also had trouble guessing at the future because technological advances for most of human history have been slow enough to present the future as very similar to the present.

So while I don't have any idea of what the earliest recorded date is, I would look to sometime after the invention of writing.

Good readings for this subject: Walter J. Ong, SJ's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" - pdf hosted on scribd

Dennis Baron's "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology"

Also check out Vilem Flusser's "The Gesture of Writing" if you want to read an unsourced but clever exercise in thinking.

Another more digressive sidenote: Fredric Jameson points out that pre-Enlightenment utopian stories depicted utopia as another space in the same time (i.e. deliverance from evil, etc.), while more modern utopian fantasies frame a belief that the future can bring better living conditions to the same space in a different time.

Here are some other interesting books about literacy and human experience:

David Vincent's The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe - a very well-sourced, data-driven, and readable study on how literacy changed political, scientific, and literary awareness in the cities and countrysides of Europe. He dwells on England more than the rest if I recall correctly.

Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms - this ethnography is about Brice Heath's observations in Trackton, NC in the early 1980s. This book is awesome because it shows how illiteracy forces some people to create very intimate social relationships with friends and strangers alike.

Gwathmey and Stern's Once Upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History - This is *not academically rigorous but it's a very cool pictorial history of how people adapted older social customs when the telephone was democratized.

Rewriting history, the way it should be done

This blog is called 'Neo-Alexandria'/Ab initio Ad infinitum.
The actual blog URL is called: http://ab-initio-ad-infinitum.blogspot.com
ab initio ad infinitum translates (roughly) From the beginning to infinity.

Why this name? Well, lets first quickly take the URL. Everything starts somewhere and continues as long as is allowed by physical sense. Though infinity doesn't exist in physical sense, from our view point on our current 'starting position'/initio, there are some infinities to be defined: the universe (we have no clue how big it is, though we know it had to start somewhere) and our knowledge of it (which is only a couple of thousand years old, with several severe reboots in it).

Why Neo-Alexandria? Well, this seemed a good idea at the time. The idea below is based on its existence, though at closer examination it might not be the best option.

As the founding of Alexandria was (one of) the fist attempt of humanity to follow the path that evolution had set for us, to gather knowledge and use our cognitive abilities to expand our insights and abilities influencing the universe we live in, I suggest the following:
Modify the date system to resemble relationship to the inquiry of humanity on knowledge: 2016+331 = 2347 AF (After Founding of Alexandria)
We could even choose to start the year on a better moment, like at an equinox. Beside that, I would suggest recallibrating the month base, as this is now strewn with latin numbers (which is fine) and references/origin in Roman Emperors (Julius, August, etc. Though these are just as valid 7 and 8).
So, First day of the year, would be at 20st of March (which would become 1st of ....). This is the march equinox and is globally accountable moment.
For the 'month periods', I would consider more global known or indicative names. Any suggestions in the comments.
Perhaps the 1st of Alex (short for Alexander, Alexander the Great).