Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News Books Media Book Reviews

The Year 1000 77

Posted by Hemos from the history-major-vibes dept.
Being the history major that I was, I was happy when Joe Mahoney offered to review Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger's new book The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first millennium. Looks back at a year in the life of a common Englishman, circa 1000 AD, in a very entertaining and informative way.
The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first mil
author Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
pages 230
publisher Little Brown & Company, 02/1999
rating 8/10
reviewer Joe Mahoney
ISBN 0316558400
summary Fascinating glimpse at the world and life of an Englishman in the Year 1000.

The Scenario

I found The Year 1000 whilst browsing the shelves of the bookstore across the road from work. With all the hype and speculation about the new millennium and the infamous Y2K bug, the title grabbed my attention straight away. The subject matter also appealled to my inner-geek: what was life like in Y1K? What technology did they have? What didn't they have yet? How did the average Joe make a gold coin? What did the beer taste like back then? All important questions I'm sure you'll agree.

What's Good?

The whole book is good. It answered all my questions, asked me a few more and answered those as well. Lacey and Danziger have based the book on a thousand year old document called the Julius Work Calendar. The first chapter of The Year 1000 describes the technology used to create such documents and how it has been preserved over the centuries.

With one chapter devoted to each month of the year, the narrative is based on illustrations gathered from the Julius Work Calendar. Where an picture shows men working in the fields, Lacey and Danziger discuss the importance of the harvest, and the general diet of an Anglo-Saxon family. A picture showing a man stealing planks introduces a chapter on crime and punishment in a time when technology hadn't advanced far enough to build reliable prisons.

There is also an interesting discussion about whether the common person was worried about their new millenium. The Venerable Bede had popularised the date system we use today in the 700s, so people actually knew about it. There was also a variation of the Y2K bug we have today: Arabic numerals and technology such as the Abacus were not popular yet, and those who could do arithmetic used Roman numberals. Try multiplying MCXIV by CXCIX in your head. According to The Year 1000:

The scholar Alucin said that 9,000 should be regarded as the upper limit beyound which figuring was not possible, and when that was written out as MMMMMMMMM one could understand what he means.
(Page 191)

The authors cover a wide range of topics from weapons technology to Anglo-Saxon medicine to religion to the discovery of the new world by Leif Eriksson. Whether you're a history buff or not, you won't get lost or confused reading this book. The style of writing is very accessible and you can easily read a couple of chapters in a luch break, which is how I did it.

What's Bad?

These are not so much bad things as "I wish there were more things". The Year 1000 only covers Anglo-Saxon England. You will find a little information about the Vikings and the Normans, but that's all. The authors never set out to show their readers a picture of the whole world and the sub-sub title of the book is An Englisman's World.

Fortunately Lacey and Danziger provide a bibliography and source notes for those who want to find out more. I'm certainly going to finding out a bit more about Europe and Arabia.

So What's In It For Me?

The Year 1000 will appeal to a wide audience. If you like reading about the past, or enjoy finding out the origins of technology, society or language, or if you just want to put the current millennium hype into perspective, this book is for you.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Table of Contents

  1. The Julius Work Calendar - The Wonder of Survival
  2. January - For All the Saints
  3. February - Welcome to Enga-lond
  4. March - Heads for Food
  5. April - Feasting
  6. May - Wealth and Wool
  7. June - Life in Town
  8. July - The Hungry Gap
  9. August - Remedies
  10. September - Pagans and Pannage
  11. October - War Games
  12. November - Females and the Price of Fondling
  13. December - The End of Things, or a New Beginning?
  14. The English Spirit
  15. Acknowledgements
  16. Bibliography
  17. Source Notes
  18. Index
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Year 1000 More

The Year 1000

Comments Filter:
  • ...were they posting about the advantages of Plate Mail v Chain Mail.

    Flame wars were probably real then too! :-)

  • subsistance farming (Score:3)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @03:57AM (#1532111)
    Everytime I come into work at this major corporation that I work for, and find people who manage people, people who manage people who manage people, and people who train the people managing the people who manage the people, and even people who don't do ANYTHING at all, I realize, we've come quite a long way from subsistance farming and feudalism back in 1000 or even 1600 for that matter.

    Think about the diverse tasks and how few of us are actually involved in production of the means by which we all live, yet at the same time we all do live. Efficiency gains and technology have allowed 2% of us to feed the other 98%, freeing them up to hack code. :)

    Just-another-gee-whiz-post.

  • Oi! (Score:2)

    by Psiren ( 6145 )
    Who are you calling common? ;)
  • I really liked this book. With all of the hoopla surrounding the y2k, the marketing was obvious. But hey, why not? The most appealing thing about this book was how easy it was to read. Reading about history is great, but something that reads like a history textbook isn't.

  • Someone will say, "First Post" (and be wrong).
    Someone else will say "This isn't News For Nerds" (and possibly be right).
    I'm going to say "Beowulf" and be on-topic (for once)

    For the ignorati, Beowulf is an epic Anglo-Saxon poem/story.

    HH

  • Millennial hysteria in 1000 (Score:3)

    by AMK ( 3114 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @04:10AM (#1532117) Homepage
    Peter N. Stearns wrote a good book called "Millennium III, Century XXI", on how people react to artificial calendrical times of transition. One thing he points out is that the idea of widespread hysteria in the year 1000 is a myth. Several different calendrical systems were still in use at the time, and the current system wasn't the most common one. (As late as the 14th century, people were still often dating things as "In year X of King Y's reign", for example.)

    So where did the idea of panic in the year 1000 come from? Mostly it came from Enlightenment-era historians, who were often anti-religious; ISTR that Stearns points at Jules Michelet [britannica.com] as originating the story in his history of France, Because it agreed with their prejudices, other historians gave Michelet's stories wide exposure, but there doesn't seem to be any actual historical evidence for them.

  • Even if you could have a web page back then, who could read it anyway? (But some websites look like they were last updated around the year 1K). Could you imagine using a Microsoft product back then? Who would use "Microsoft Sword"? It gives a different meaning to the Blue Screen of Death. -barf
  • The year 1000 was 66 years before the Norman Conquest of England - the last time England was ever conquered.

    7777 is -far- worse then 9000, in Roman numerals, being MMMMMMMCCCMLXXIIX. Try squaring that! :)

    1000 AD was about the peak of the Viking age, in Europe, when their empire stretched from Kiev to the shores of Newfoundland in America, and from the arctic circle down to the mediterranean basin.

    Chainmail was popular, but very difficult to make. Each link was alternatively welded and riveted. Given that a suit typically had 100,000 links, and weighed 50 lbs, it was not something a lot of people had a spare suit of. (Mind you, chainmail is great for weekends. No need to iron it!)

    Millenium fever did not really exist, in the same way, as not everyone used the Gregorian calendar. The Julius calendar was still in fashion, for all it's problems. But, those places that recognised the millenium -did- have problems with doomsday cults and other such stuff.

    1000 AD also saw the tail-end of the British Dark Ages, which ended with the Norman Conquest. The Dark Ages started with the Roman withdrawl, in 450 AD. Whilst not really "dark", this time marks a period of significantly less mass technology. Personal technology (eg: ornaments, jewelry, etc.) was at it's finest, and has never been superceded.

    1000 AD was almost 500 years after the Irish discovered America (St Brenden the Navigator) and about the time Leif Erikson discovered the same country. (America has the distinction of being discovered by more civilisations than any other in history. Rumours that they left in disgust, after seeing Microsoft, Los Angeles and Disney World are denied.)

    1000 AD was 1200 years after the Greeks discovered the world was round, that it orbited the sun and that the stars were further away than anything else that could be observed.

  • The Year 1000 only covers Anglo-Saxon England.

    Yeah! Forget about the Brits, what I want to know is, what happened in the good old US of A in the year 1000!

    :) (emoticon for the humour-impaired)

    "The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

  • The concept of historical and economic progress is an invention of the Enlightment (1700+). So many of these books about "then" being a stepping stone to "now" is modern historical revisionism imposed on a society that did not have a sense of progress.
  • Given enough time, medieval accounts may have extended the counting with a number for 10,000 and so on. This happend in ancient Greece and China (still using a base-10,000 counting). Originally Latin was like Greek and Hebrew with letters signifying 1-9, 10-90, 100-900, but most letters were discarded. See Shah's book "From One to Zero" about a history of counting systems. "One,Two" is probably the first number invented while "zero" is among the last, requiring a leap of algebraic insight to make "nothing" behave like "something". The base-10 numerals, zero, and the place system where adopted from the Hindus via the Arabs at the end of the first millenium.
  • Newfoundland is in Canada, not America, unless you take "America" to mean all of North America. (Manifest Destiny, no? :) )

  • The Abacus (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "There was also a variation of the Y2K bug we have today: Arabic numerals and technology such as the Abacus were not popular yet, and those who could do arithmetic used Roman numberals."

    I'm surprised by this statement. Arabic numerals don't show up for a couple hundred years, but the Romans had a counting board abacus, at least. I'd think that those who were doing arithmetic would be reasonably frequently found using something like them.

  • 1000 Anno Domini saw the Muslim culture in Andalusia (now Spain) flourishing to the point it overshaddowed the rest of Europe.
    ----------------------------------------------

  • While this may be slightly off-topic (and I apologize in advance for this), Signal to Noise [nextplanetover.com], by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean gives a fictional account of this same event. It's one of those "fiction within fiction" stories, with a dying film producer imagining what would have been his greatest movie ever, the story of a European village coping with the millennial shift.

  • Re:Millennial hysteria in 1000 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There was some hysteria in Britain and Ireland, both of which were cutting-edge technologically, and christian-dominated, at the time. Since the church was quite powerful then, and the populace relatively educated (relative to other european countries, which suffered more during the dark ages), there was a fair bit of "oh, the second coming is upon us". This is docmented in manuscripts preserved *from that era*.

    Yopu are correct in that taking europe as a whole, there was much less impact. But the book deals specifically with England
  • Actually, I think you'll find you've gone a bit too far back. In England, around 1000AD the chiefs were answerable to the king, there was an extensive common law, and the church was powerful enough to intervene and often took responsibility for justice. There was a concept of citizenship, but it had to be earned (rather like ancient Greece) - there were also serfs, who were unpaid labourers, but who were free to go if they thought they could survive on their own (usually they came crawling back) One problem is that propaganda put out by the Normans after their conquest (66 years after the date in question), unfairly represents the Anglo-Saxon/Norse population mix of the time.

    It was the Norman Nobles who grabbed power and tended to wield more absolute justice - a step back, really.

  • I picked up "Millennium" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto a while back, and still haven't got more than 39 pages into it (out of 710).
    It's a history of the last 1000 years of humanity, on a global scale. Pretty darn interesting. I hope to get to at least page 300 by X-Mas, depending on work and all those other books I'm reading!

    Pope
  • I'll just be happy when people start realising that the millennium doesn't turn until January 1, 2001! Millenia are counted 1-1000, not 0-999. (i.e. the current millennium began in 1001, NOT 1000, so it ends in 2000, not 1999) Just like centuries are counted 1-100, not 0-99 (1901-2000, not 1900-1999), and decades are counted 1-10, not 0-9 (1991-2000, not 1990-1999).

    See http://www.millennium321.com [millennium321.com] for more info. Click on the link "When Does The New Millennium Actually Begin?" for a detailed explanation.

    It's truly sad that people want to celebrate a year early just because four numbers change on the year. I know it's exciting, but it's just not the turn of the Millennium. Get over it.

  • While Venerable (St.) Bede was the one who popularised the BC/AD base for the current calendar, it was "Dennis the short" (a monk) who came up with this about 200yrs before Bede, who died in 735.

    FWIW St. Bede's bones were moved after his death, and are now at Durham Cathedral, which was built a few hundred years later (completed in 1132), which is still in use today, and has the most awesome stained glass windows. If you're into stained glass, then Coventry Cathedral is also a must-see.
  • "not everyone used the Gregorian calendar"

    I would expect no one used the Gregorian calandar since Pope Gregory XIII ordered the calendar change in 1582.

  • Millenium fever did not really exist, in the same way, as not everyone used the Gregorian calendar. The Julius calendar was still in fashion, for all it's problems. But, those places that recognised the millenium -did- have problems with doomsday cults and other such stuff.

    Not surprising that not many people used the Gregorian calendar in 1000. It wasn't created until 1582...

    Jon
  • Anonymous coward is right: people back then had nothing comparing to our modern concept of "progress," except in the case of "moral progress," which was an incrementally slow and painful process. For anyone interested in how people imagined their world back then, see "Medieval Society," a collection of essays with the first one by Mircea Eliade (that one being the seminal serious work up to its writing) and also see Peter Brown's works ("The Cult of Saints" being a great place to start). We tend not to realize that medieval's world view was infused with a sense of the religious and sacramental and a sense of connection rather than our modern sense of isolation.
  • Yep, prisons were reserved for really rich people
    or very notorious criminals.

    Not so long ago ( ~200 years ), when you commited a crime, they chopped off your hands or executed you. It had nothing to do with not having tech. to build good prisons, they believed that when you commited a crime you should be punished for it.


  • beagle, I don't want this to sound like flamebait; I've seen many people get, erm, anal-retentive about this issue, so I'm wondering...

    What does it matter if the new Millennium is celebrated in 2000 or in 2001? I know that the Millennium starts in 2001, but it hardly matters to me that the calendar is one year offset from Way Back Then(tm). Celebrating the new Millennium December 31st, 1999 is like celebrating your birthday a saturday because it actually falls on a monday: you're better off celebrating when the timing's right than when it's -really- supposed to happen.

    I mean, it's just an excuse to par-tee anyway.

    "The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

  • How Millenia count depends on whose "expert" opinion and calendar you want to use.
    All measurement of dates is completelty arbitrary. If I want to use the Astronomical calendar, with a Year 0 and Year 2000 atlas, I will.
    What year is it in the Jewish calendar? Hmm?
    The big triple-zero has too much cachet to ignore, I agree. IMO, considering the number of times through history that our current calendar has been fucked with, adding and deleting days to match the seasons, moving the New Year around, etc. 2000 marks the perfect time to start over.
    Don't argue to convince me I am wrong, I'm stating an opinion. If I want to celebrate 2000 as Millennial, I damn well will, "right" or "wrong."


    Pope
  • were about the colors of dragons.

    Green!

    Purple!
    /.

  • Not insufficient tech, but too little bureaucracy (Score:4)

    by twit ( 60210 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @07:43AM (#1532145) Homepage
    I agree and disagree with you (no doubt this is typical slashdot behaviour).

    Prisons were reserved for notorious criminals (to a point, given the plethora of capital crimes - not that there was a common law worthy of the name at that point) and rich people (for practical reasons - a rich man at that time would be a feudal lord in his own right, with a more or less substantial fighting force at his disposal. Personal incarceration was a way of demonstrating one's power over them, and was generally a political rather than a criminal act.) Agreed, prisons as such did exist.

    It's more interesting to uncover why they were so reserved. It wasn't because they preferred to deal out harsh and physical punishments, but because there was no way to set up the administrative apparatus to finance and run a system of incarceration. You have to go all the way to the eighteenth century to see that happening - and as soon as it did, crime "boomed". The first part of Hughes' The Fatal Shore covers this in gruesome detail - prisons throughout the land were packed with the overflow caged in hulks, and executions were performed in wholesale. Australia was a safety valve, especially for political prisoners, although the majority of deportees were petty criminals.). In other words, it may have been possible to build a prison, but not to run the system to fill it, staff it, and empty and refill it.

    What is important to note is that there were no public records save ecclesiastical ones (baptisms, deaths) until the seventeenth century or thereabouts. A modern criminal system, which incorporates the concept of incarceration, penance (as in penitentiary), and rebirth of the criminal into civil society (see the reformer Jeremy Bentham for more on that topic), requires such records, even if for mere criminal records, to gauge the quality and quantity of punishment. In other words, the appropriateness of punishment.

    Older criminal systems did not consider the necessity for penance on the part of the criminal. It simply wasn't part of their moral calculus. In this sense they did not believe that when you committed a crime you should be punished for it; they believed that a crime was an offense against the power of the sovereign, and it was on these grounds that you were punished (Foucault, both Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish).

    --

  • Re:The Big Wars... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    WHITE BUNNIES ARE THE MOST EFFICIENT KILLERS. And don't you forget it.

    DEATH AWAITS YOU ALL, WITH NASTY BIG, POINTY TEETH!

  • help help ime being repressed!!!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    did they include the fact you could tell king from pesant by the fact the king didnt have shit all over him, or did they show the violence inherent in the system, or peasants crying for help as they were being repressed.
  • ...is better written as MMMMMMMDCCLXXVII, especially as your version converts to 7778 (as MMMMMMM(CCC)MLXX(II)X). Mine's definitely easier to read and separate into component parts. Are you allowed multiple subtractive prefixes (CCCM)?
    Actually, no. The rule is that the arabic number should be divided into numbers that are multiples of the power of ten (e.g. thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones), and then written out like a sentence, from left to right. Only one subtractive prefix per "power of ten" digit is allowed. Anything beyond the first base-10 digit is appended to the number:
    3 = III
    9 = IX
    20 = XX
    78 = LXXVIII LXX(70)VIII(8)
    499 = CDXCIX CD(400)XC(90)IX(9)
    501 = DI D(500)I(1)
    653 = DCLIII DC(600)L(50)III(3)
    1009 = MIX M(1000)IX(9)
    1988 = MCMLXXXVIII M(1000)CM(900)LXXX(80)VIII(8)
    7777 = MMMMMMMDCCLXXVII --or-- VIIDCCLXXVII
    This last one is tricky because the numbering system for Roman numerals isn't intended to be used for such large numbers. Traditionally, the same glyphs can be eternally cycled to demonstrate the infinite progression and cycling of arabic numbers.
    But this is just all my $0.02.
  • Weren't you talking about a cluster of 64 cloistered monks with abacii?
    (singular: abacus, plural: abacii?)
    (singular: virus, plural: viruses)

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • It's called "mail". Not chainmail. Put your D&D books away and get thee to a library.

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • ...is Umberto Eco's Postscript to The Name of the Rose. In it, he tenders an interesting reading of the Book of Revelations: there will be a great deal of trouble, Christianity will spread all over the world, and then will be a thousand years of wonders and marvels, after which we will live in Paradise.

    Well? Don't we? In the late Roman period, glass was counted as a precious stone, and vessels made of it were thought of the same way we would a piece of pure jade today. We make walls of glass today, and if it breaks, we toss it out. I'm sitting here topless, while the wind howls outside, and a nice hot bath is drawing in the tub. I've got a roast fowl for my gnawing pleasure, an Oriental rug underfoot, scented candles, music playing at my beck and call, and the Magic Loom sends messangers of pure light to carry my words to the ends of the earth....and I live under the poverty level!

    My other favorite Millenial topic is the identity of the Beast. As detailed in the thirteenth chapter of Revelations, there is not one, but two beasts, the 666 guy, and the Master of Illusions. Disaster strikes 666, and he looks dead, but his collegue MoI makes him look alive again. (Whether he is or not, is a Good Question.) This would point to someone in a database field, and to someone who can rig SFX, especially digitally. The largest database company in the world is Oracle, which keeps records for the CIA, among other worthies. Larry Ellison is notoriously accident-prone: he nearly lost an arm while falling off a bicycle. His best friend is Steve Jobs, who runs Pixar. This would mean that BillG. is on the side of the angels. Of course, this is being written by someone who likes angels....

  • Millenium schmillenium.

    People want to party - the sooner the better. No history geek is going to tell the masses with their horded cases of Budweiser that they're going to have to put off the party of the millenium for another year. They won't wait for a technicality.

    This year WILL be the party of the millenium, and people who are selling beer, champagne, party dresses, and renting ballrooms, are going to make a shitload of money off of it. Then next year, we'll start to see mainstream media hyping the REAL party for the following year. That party will be just as "big" if not bigger. But shhhhh! don't tell anybody. It's a secret, and you're just a party pooper.



    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • IIIIIIIII + I
    X
    XXXXXXXXX + X
    C
    CCCCCCCCC + C
    M
    MMMMMMMMM + M
    ????

    I agree that 9000 would be a painful number to work out in roman numerals, but I think he was really referring to the lack of any symbol higher then 1000.
  • A similar book, but that looks at Europe and politics around the year 1000, is _The _Last _Apocalypse_ by James Reston, Jr.

    Like _The _Year _1000_, it's popular history, but a nice overview of what was happening, and well written (is is just me, or have historians actually learned how to write in the past 20 years?).

  • what DONT you understand about a FREE, PUBLIC, OPEN SOURCE forum?!
  • Chainmail was popular, but very difficult to make.

    Unfortunately, the opposite is the case these days.
  • I haven't seen your cycling version (VIIDCCLXXVII) but what I have seen is symbols with bars over then, which means 1000 times the value.
    _
    V = 5000

    So, 7777 would best be written:
    _
    VMMDCCLXXVII
  • I know that the Millennium starts in 2001, but it hardly matters to me that the calendar is one year offset from Way Back Then(tm).

    Actually, there's no one "right" answer to this. The Gregorian calendar is scarred at the BC/AD transition, going from 1BC (-1) to 1AD (+1). You can argue that the first century is missing a year, which puts the Millenium at Jan 2000, or you can argue that a century must span 100 years, which puts the Millenium at Jan 2001.

    While it's true that a century is by definition 100 years long, it's also true that 0 comes between -1 and 1, also by definition. So both positions are equally valid, and it really comes down to personal preference.

    Besides, *two* excuses to party are better than one! :)

  • Grrr!!! *kicks TARDIS* K9! Go and get your memory banks fixed!
  • In my way of thinking, the super-accurate time of the new millennium is 00:00:00 01/01/2001. But a good way of celebrating is to make the period 00:00:00 01/01/2000 to 23:59:59 31/12/2000 the "new" millennium.

    Given that this event happens only every 1000 years, why not take a year to celebrate it?
  • Mail is readily confused with latter-day objects in envelopes, and the object with links -really- should not be confused with those tin-pots the Crusaders and Civil War warriors used.

    (Roundhead armour is a -pain-! If any women's lib groups read Slashdot, I would strongly suggest getting men to try on a suit. It might do wonders for respect.)

  • >>>I realize, we've come quite a long way from subsistance farming and feudalism back in 1000 or even 1600 for that matter.

    Sure, in the feudal system, they had people managing the people who manage people. They were called "Lords" and "Kings". Sure, they might be called on to "Defend the Realm," how much time did they spend doing that? Mostly, they managed their little fiefdom like a middle-level manager in a large corporation. Even before that, in the Roman Empire, there was an entire social caste that existed solely to enjoy life, going to orgies and visiting the vomitorium to empty their stomach for yet another round of debachery. You have to go way back to the times when everyone was a "Primitive" hunter-gatherer and lived in small bands of people. I think that as soon as people get to a critical mass of around 10, somebody tries to manage it.

    The problem is, humans are by nature lazy. Why should I work when I can manage and let everyone else do it all for me?

    So, while the technology has increased food production to a point that not everybody has to provide for themselves, the basic nature of people remains the same.

    Oh god, I feel a communist propoganda slogan creeping up on me. Yuck!

    --Defend the Realm!!!

  • Most people who are pushing this idea of 2001 being the start of the new millennium forget one thing: the calender is based on the estimated birth of Christ. Now, you may not believe he was the son of God, but it is a little hard to argue that he was born 1 year old. That would make it possible to have a year 0. After all, how old was I from from June 10, 1968 (my date of birth) to June 10, 1969? 1 year old?

    The thing that makes all this work is the fact that the modern calender wasn't in use at the time it was started.

  • Just thought I'd mention the fact that the millennium did not occur until 1001 (just as the next millennium will occur in 2001, not 2000). There was no year zero.

    Whatever.

  • "After all, how old was I from from June 10, 1968 (my date of birth) to June 10, 1969?"

    Ah, yes, but that was the _first_ year of your existence. The next year being your _second_, etc.. Much the same as in _first_ year of our Lord, _second_ year, one thousand nine hundred and ninetyninth year, etc.. It's not age.

    There are better reasons for ambiguity. This is not one of them.
  • "the calender is based on the estimated birth of Christ"

    Bzzt. Wrong, sorry. Ole J.C. was born ~4 B.C., if you believe he was born at all. Which means that 1996 was 2000 years after his birth.

    The 0 has something to do with the crowning of a king in Rome. I mean, they didn't even have English as we know it in 0, or even 1000. So B.C. = before Christ and A.D. = After death are both pretty silly. Especially when you realize he was 30 (supposedly) when he keeled over. What? 30 years without a year?

    Of course, I could be wrong.

    But, if I were god, I would like really big round numbers.

    Later . . .
  • well, they didn't have to wait for 'Windows 1000',
    that's for sure.

    life was good then ...


  • I wrote a column about Millenialism and the upsurge of millenial cults some time back, and called up an old college friend of mine, Prof. Steven Muhlberger of the University of Ipissing, for some perspective. He is a medieval scholar, and was kind enough to fill my ear for some time.

    His take on the matter is that there was enough unrest all throughout Europe at the end of the first millenium that it is difficult to make any general statements with certainty. He believes that there is some evidence that there were millenial cults back then, but that times were so generally rotten everywhere that most people had other things to worry about.

    He did say that there is evidence being uncovered of late that our Christian calendar was developed around 600 A.D. as an anti-millenial device; that according to at least one of the calendars in general use, the timetable given in the Book of Revelations could be regarded as just about expired. The Church was very much against Millenialism because people who are expecting the imminent end of the world do not a) harvest crops, b) sell crops, or c) use the money to tithe to the Church. Much badness. Therefore, they put it out that years really should be numbered starting with the birth of Christ, which put us at a nice safe 600 A.D. and nowhere near the Millenium.

    400 years later, of course, this came back and bit them in the tuchus, but by this time the calendar was so firmly entrenched that they couldn't futz with it again. Besides, there was enough trouble from the Knights Chevalier (I think) and others that they weren't about to borrow more trouble.

    This millenium is peachy-keen compared with the last one.
  • Abaci.

    I don't know much Latin, but I believe that the plural of -us is -i, and you only get two i's if the singular ends in -ius.
    --
  • For all of you who like to celebrate the turn of a century in a year ending in 01, I direct you to Douglas Adams' take on all of this.
    http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedant s.html [douglasadams.com]

    Anyhow, who cares if some Roman guy messed everything up because there was no Roman numeral 0. Our number system has a 0 in it, so we might as well USE it. I doubt that the people who lived in 1 B.C. will care.
    --
  • America = USA
    The americas = north and south america

    one could also use America to refer to the USA and america to refer to the two contenents, as it is a thing not a name.

  • 1066 (Score:1)

    by rkayakr ( 66031 )
    If you enjoyed 1000 you might enjoy 1066 by David Howath. I first read this account of an eventful year in the life of Britan in the 70s and have reread it several times.
  • I can do it on paper, only making it even clearer why the Romans didn't do much with big numbers.

    MCXIV
    x CXCIX
    -------

    Multiply each digit through, taking into account if it is negative. I'll use bold to represent the overline (a modern notation for writing large values of Roman numerals).

    XMCXL
    - MCXIV
    + CXMCD
    - XMCXL
    + CXMCD
    -------


    Cancel out the XMCXL's, and convert everything to contain no subtraction within the numerals.
    CXMCCCC + CXMCCCC - MCXIIII =

    Now, for the subtraction, borrow an LXXXXVIIIII.
    CXMCCCLXXXXVIIIII + CXMCCCC - MCXIIII =

    Cancel out equivalent numerals that are subtracted, and concatenate the rest.
    CCXXMCCCCCCLXXXVI

    And convert back into standard Roman Numerals.
    CCXXMDCLXXXVI

    Now imagine chiseling all this into stone.
    Makes you glad that the Arabs came along, and we can just say 1114 x 199 = 221686, doesn't it?
    --
  • For those interested in millenialism and the millenium controversy, PBS had an interesting NewsHour interview [pbs.org] with Stephen Jay Gould about two years ago. The interview discusses topics from his then-recent book, Questioning the Millennium, which has just been reissued. Here are links to it at Amazon [amazon.com] and f atbrain [fatbrain.com].
  • > The Y2K patches for MS-Access will take any two digit year item and add 1900.

    Could be tough news if you just got sentenced to 99 years of hard labor.

    --
    It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
  • > 1000 AD also saw the tail-end of the British Dark Ages, which ended with the Norman Conquest.

    I disagree. The Anglo-Saxon court of Alfred (871-899) was one of the brightest lights north of Andalusia and Constantinople during this period.

    --
    It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
  • Circa 1000AD Leif Erikson

    "Discovered" the new world

    His crew held hostage, introduced JudeoChristian theocracy to Iceland

    Shortly thereafter the Althing (Icelanding congress) voted to:

    Make Christianity the state religion

    Outlaw single combat as the appeal of last resort in dispute resolution

    Rather than these measures reducing violence among the Icelandic clans, blood feud and outright warfare became the appeal of last resort in dispute resolution, increasing bloodshed.

    Leif's father, Erik the Red, leader of the Greenland colony, made the following observation of his son's contribution to the family's honor:

    "I am proud of your discovery of Vinland (new world) and shamed that you brought the hypocrite among us."

    New world settlement ceased and a massive die-off of Icelandic and Greenland populations ensued in the following centuries.

  • Your second paragraph is quite insightful. I don't think most people can grasp just how much progress we've made.

    But the roast fowl... ? Tastes like chicken?

    Erik
  • One out of six is a LOT better than one out of 10,000 or more. Also, the other five billion are beginning to move up....
  • A turkey. Better yet, a cheap turkey. Like 8 pounds for $3 US.....

Slashdot Top Deals

"Hello again, Peabody here..." -- Mister Peabody

Close