At one time, the counting of time was local and irregular, and it became universal and linear in 311 BC. And then the story changed dramatically. We are sure that a hundred years ago was 1919, and a thousand years later 3019 will come. Now imagine a world in which there is no direct time along which you can build a chronology of events, memories and hopes for the future.
What year is it now? 2019, and this is quite obvious. Simple question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are sure that a hundred years ago was 1919, and in a thousand years the year 3019 will come (if by that time someone will remain on Earth to count). We've all mastered timing very well. We, like most of our world, use it without even thinking. He is present everywhere. As a child, I laid out my coins by year of minting. Now I carefully mark the publication dates of my scientific articles.
Now imagine a world in which there is no such straight line of time, along which you can build a chronology of current events, memories and hopes for the future. From the very first days of chronicle history and up to the period after the conquests of Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BC. historical time, as the public and annual chronology is called, could be measured in only three ways: unique events, annual cycles, and periods of kingship.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the years could be designated by outstanding events from the past. One could, for example, say that something happened in the year when King Naram-Sin reached the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, or when King Enlil-Bani made three very large statues of copper for the god Ninurta. Or the events could be attributed to a specific time, giving them the name of the supreme ruler of that period. For example, such and such an event happened in the year when two named Romans were consuls, or when a noble Athenian was the city head, and so on. And finally, which most often happened in the ancient kingdoms, events could be attributed to a specific time, counting which year the monarch is on the throne: the fifth year of the reign of Alexander the Great, the 40th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, etc.
Each of these systems had limited geographic boundaries. There was no general system for determining one's place in the stream of history, independent of geography. How could events be synchronized at a distance or between states? Take as an example the Peloponnesian War waged by Athens and Sparta in the last third of the 5th century BC. This is how the great Athenian historian Thucydides tried to indicate the time of its beginning:
The "Thirty Years Peace" that came after the capture of the island of Euboea lasted 14 years. In the fifteenth year, in the forty-eighth year of the priesthood of Chrysis in Argos, when Enesias was an ephor in Sparta, and Pythodorus remained two months before the end of the archonship in Athens, six months after the siege of Potidea and in early spring, the Thebes army of 300 soldiers in the first night shift carried out an armed attack on the Boeotian city of Plateia, which was allied with Athens.
Instead of simply writing "in 431 BC," Thucydides was forced to synchronize the beginning of the war with other reference coordinates in time, such as diplomatic, religious, social, military, seasonal and other events. These dates are closely related to the institutions of a centralized state, depend on bureaucratic lists, are applicable only in a limited geographic space, and are very sensitive to political changes. In fact, these are not even dates, but a list of numerous events, an agreed list of more or less known incidents. That which dates and that which dates it belong to the same order of things. Imagine giving the date of the invasion of Iraq, the date of birth of your grandmother, or the date of American independence in the same way. And then try to explain it to some foreigner.
In the chaos that followed the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC, everything changed. One of Alexander's Macedonian military leaders, who conquered a huge kingdom stretching from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, introduced a new chronology system. She was named after this commander Seleucus - the Seleucid chronology. It was the world's first continuous and irreversible counting system for years lived. It was the unrecognized predecessor of every subsequent time system, including the Christian chronology from the Nativity of Christ, our new era, the Jewish era of creation, the Islamic hijra, the chronology of the French Revolution, and so on.
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The Seleucid chronology began from the first year (this is the date of the arrival of Seleucus I Nicator in Babylon in 311 BC) and every year his count increased according to the formula n + 1. When Seleucus I died, his son Antiochus I did not restart the clock, but continued counting the years. His successors did the same. For the first time in history, historical time began to be marked with a number, and it was no longer turned back, reset or stopped. This time is still moving. This is the time as we know it (2019, 2020, 2021, and so on). It is generally recognized, universal, absolute, autonomous, and the count of this time is regularly increasing. It is not connected with political events, with the life cycles of rulers, with conquests. It does not depend on imperial officials and chroniclers. It can be used at a distance to correlate events.
The Seleucid chronology, with its regularly increasing number of years, has given us a whole new type of predictability. A citizen of, say, the aged Nebuchadnezzar II in the 40th year of his reign (he ruled for 43 years) could not confidently and accurately imagine, name and keep in his imagination the date in the future, which will come in a few years, decades or centuries. Now, thanks to the Seleucus chronology, this could be done easily and simply, without any problems, and any subject of the Seleucids could do it. In one of the new novels of the Norwegian writer Karl Uwe Knausgaard, there are lines that very accurately characterize the power of these changes: “It was as if a wall had been torn down in the room they lived in. The world no longer embraced them from all sides completely and completely. Suddenly a gap opened … Their gaze was no longer resisted,and stretched farther and farther."
All of this would be an interesting aspect of intellectual history that has little social significance if it weren't for two additional factors. First, the Seleucid chronology materialized only and exclusively in numerical form. In whatever language the date was recorded in the Seleucid chronology - and we have evidence that the counting system existed in the ancient Greek, Akkadian, Phoenician and Aramaic languages - the numerical value of the indicated year was unchanged everywhere. That is, with a huge variety of vast imperial territories, the Seleucid chronology, as an unchanging and uniform system of counting, became a regulating force ensuring homogeneity.
Secondly, the designation of the years according to the Seleucid chronology reached an unprecedented scale and was used in various spheres of public and private life. Dates were put on market scales, on the handles of jugs, on coins, on building structures, on offerings to temples, on rings with seals, on royal letters, on administrative decrees, on gravestones, on tax receipts, on scrolls of priests, on border and boundary signs, astronomical reports, personal horoscopes, marriage contracts, and more. In an era where dates are everywhere, it is easy to underestimate the innovative power and relevance, as well as the historical importance of, this massive date designation. But in the ancient world, it was unprecedented and incomparable. In no other state of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia did the rulers and their subjects inhabited the territories where the dates were so consistently and everywhere.
Why is all this important?
Chronology of events and date stamping may not seem like the most interesting and exciting activity at first glance, but they are the ones that create history, because dates do a double job. Firstly, they allow events to happen only once, and secondly, they organize all events and tie them together. Before this or that event becomes an integral part of history, it must be tied to place and time. And the methods by which we date our world, realize the historical duration and course of time, shape our perception of the present, our thoughts about the future, our memories of the past. They reconcile us with fleetingness and impermanence, and provide an opportunity to understand a world that is much larger, older and more durable than ourselves.
The Seleucid chronology, which became a new and ubiquitous system of time counting, which led to the future open by it, offered fundamentally new opportunities and challenges in the field of politics, history and religion. We ourselves today feel quite comfortable with such a system, but for the ancient world, which was accustomed to isolation in time, it was a powerful explosion and a real revolution. Such a system dealt a strong blow to centuries-old ideas about the future and the past, and I would say that it created new platforms for rivalry between the Seleucid empire and its peoples, the peoples.
Empires claim time and space. And then their subjects begin to resist. From the second century BC and until its final disintegration in 64 BC. The Seleucid empire faced increasingly powerful and aggressive resistance from subordinate societies deep in the Levant, Babylonia and western Iran. The most famous resistance movement was the Maccabean Uprising, in which the Jews of Judea were participants. They opposed the troops of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV and his successors, liberated the Jerusalem Temple, and eventually gained an independent political space in the form of the Hasmonean state on the territory of modern Israel. These events are still celebrated during the Hanukkah holiday. Resistance to the Seleucids was directed not only against their infrastructure, tax requirements,colonial arrangements and political domination. The temporal order established by them also became its goal.
Crucially, the first apocalypses in history took place in the Seleucid kingdom, in this new world that was relentlessly filled with dates. They found a full and detailed reflection in world history, emerging from the depths of the past, going through a series of kingdoms and historical eras, entering the Seleucid empire, and then moving on to the predicted end of times. Works with predictions about the end of the world appeared only during the Seleucid empire, in Babylon, in the Persian kingdoms and in the classical city-states of ancient Greece. There were no such predictions outside the Seleucid empire, for example, in the Hellenic kingdoms and in Rome. This phenomenon is limited by the territorial boundaries of the subject population of the Seleucid kingdom.
The theological and political roots of "apocalyptic eschatology," as literature about the end of the world is called, are very complex and diverse. All teachings about the Second Jerusalem Temple, as well as early Christian theological thought, are devoted to the problem of the creation of the world. But Seleucid chronology has played no role in existing studies of classical ancient history and in biblical studies. I dare to suggest that the ubiquity and bureaucratic formalization of an irreversible, endless and generally recognized system of time counting provoked fantasies about the finiteness of life among those who wanted to fight the Seleucid empire. The only way to stop openly futuristic and endless time in the Seleucid kingdom was to end time itself.
The most famous of these early apocalyptic writings, and the only canonized biblical text on this subject, is the Book of Daniel from the Hebrew Scriptures. Today it is the simplest biblical book, for it tells about world history through the mouth of an ancient prophet. This story is quite accurate up to 165 BC, but then wild inaccuracies appear in it. In 165 BC. Jews of Judea, led by Judas Maccabee, tried to throw off the yoke of the Seleucid empire, so this book was written during the military conflict.
There are a number of very famous episodes in the Book of Daniel, including the story of Daniel in the lion's den, the inscription on the wall that appeared at the feast at Belshazzar, about the appearance of "one who, like a son of man, will punish the four beasts that came out of the waters of chaos." Let's remember the metal idol from the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, which may be the earliest apocalyptic episode from Judaism.
The storyline is as follows. King Nebuchadnezzar II, the greatest of Babylonian kings four centuries before the book was written, had a terrible dream. When he woke up, he ordered to convene all the Eastern diviners - Egyptian sorcerers, Akkadian astrologers, Babylonian soothsayers and Chaldeans. The king demanded that these people not only interpret his dream, but first retell its content. When the sages of Babylon protested, saying that this was impossible, Nebuchadnezzar ordered their execution.
On the eve of the mass execution of the wise men, the content of the dream and its meaning were revealed to Daniel, exiled from Judea, who lived at the court in Babylon. The next day Daniel demanded to stop the execution and said to the king: “You, king, had such a vision: behold, some big idol; This idol was huge, it stood before you in extreme brilliance, and its appearance was terrible. This image had a head of pure gold, his chest and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs were of copper, his legs were iron, his legs were partly iron, partly made of clay. You saw him, until the stone broke away from the mountain without the help of hands, struck the idol, his iron and clay feet, and broke them. Then everything was shattered together: iron, clay, copper, silver and gold became like dust on the threshing floors of summer, and the wind carried them away, and no trace remained of them; but the stone that broke the image,became a great mountain and filled the whole earth."
Daniel interpreted it this way. Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian Empire are the golden head. The Babylonian kingdom will fall to another empire of silver and copper. This is the Medes kingdom. Then the third kingdom, copper, will rule over all the earth. This is the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. And finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, "strong as iron." Daniel explained: "As iron breaks and shatters everything, so it, like the all-crushing iron, will shatter and crush" all these former states. This is the empire of Alexander the Great and his successors the Seleucids. But it will split and collapse like a colossus with feet of clay.
Daniel ends his story with an explanation about the stone that will destroy the statue and turn into a mountain: “And in the days of those kingdoms (Seleucids), God of heaven will raise up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, and this kingdom will not be transferred to another people; it will crush and destroy all kingdoms, and itself will stand forever. Unlike other empires that would be captured and destroyed by earthly powers, the end of the Seleucid empire would mean the end of history itself.
Such a concept (and there are several others in the book that are similar to it) builds history in a line consisting of several successive empires: Babylonia, Media, Persia, and the kingdom of the Seleucids. The symbol of the earthly empire is a huge idol made of processed materials - metals and baked clay. This statue is transient, ephemeral, fragile, unstable, like an idol. And then history will collapse, and in its place will come the eternal heavenly kingdom - an unchanging natural stone that has not been touched by a human hand.
The historical apocalypses, which appeared in Judea, Babylonia and Persia under the Seleucids, as a genre, represent the battle between the king and God for power over time and over the architecture of history. They show that the claims of empires are illusory and move the destinies of nations to heaven.
As we can see, for the kingdom of the Seleucids, time is inaccessible to understanding and impartial. The future is monotonous and charmless. Temporary texture is depersonalized. There is no way to start all over again. The worst part is that there is infinity, which indirectly suppresses eternity. Seleucid time was nothing more than a momentary and passing moment, and therefore it was a loss. Tick-tock, tick-tock …
But in historical apocalypses, time, including the future, is already predetermined. In it, everything that happened to you, happened to you, and to no one else. History is being shaped, directed, and on its way to completion. All various events are part of one story, a universal story. Above all, these historic apocalypses bring the end of the world to life. In our example, this is a stone that destroys the earthly kingdom. It is not only the dream of the destruction of the Seleucid kingdom; it is a new sense of the end times.
The end of the world has reached a kind of integration in time. Likewise, the mirror needs a background in order for us to see something. They turned the sense of the sequence of events into a storyline. Now time no longer passes just like that, in vain and irrevocably. Now it has a meaning and an ending. Tick tock, period.
Paul J Kosmin