B.C. (or BC) - Counting and Numbering Pre-Roman Time

B.C. (or BC) - Counting and Numbering Pre-Roman Time The term BC (or B.C.) is used by most people in the west to refer to pre-Roman dates in the Gregorian Calendar (our current calendar of choice). BC refers to Before Christ, meaning before the putative birth year of the prophet/philosopher Jesus Christ, or at least before the date once thought to be that of Christs birth (the year AD 1). The first surviving use of the BC/AD convention was by the Carthaginian bishop Victor of Tunnuna (died AD 570). Victor was working on a text called Chronicon, a history of the world begun by Christian bishops in the 2nd century AD. BC/AD was also used by the British monk the Venerable Bede, who wrote over a century after Victors death. The BC/AD convention was probably established as early as the first or second century AD, if not widely used until much later. But the decision to mark years AD/BC at all is only the most prevalent convention of our current western calendar in use today, and it was devised only after some tens of thousands of years of mathematical and astronomical investigations. Calendars BC The people who likely devised the earliest calendars are thought to have been motivated by food: the need to track seasonal  growth rates in plants and migrations in animals. These early astronomers marked time by the only way possible: by learning the motions of celestial objects such as the sun, moon, and stars. These earliest calendars were developed all over the world, by hunter-gatherers whose lives depended on knowing when and where the next meal was coming from. Artifacts that may represent this important first step are called tally sticks, bone and stone objects which bear incised marks that may refer to the numbers of days between moons. The most elaborate of such objects is the (somewhat controversial of course) Blanchard Plaque, a 30,000-year old piece of bone from the Upper Paleolithic site of Abri Blanchard, in the Dordogne valley of France; but there are tallies from much older sites that may or may not represent calendrical observations. The domestication of plants and animals brought an additional layer of complexity: people were dependent on knowing when their crops would ripen or when their animals would gestate. Neolithic calendars must include the stone circles and megalithic monuments of Europe and elsewhere, some of which mark the important solar events such as solstices and equinoxes. The earliest possible first written calendar identified to date is the Gezer calendar, inscribed in ancient Hebrew and dated to 950 BC. Shang dynasty oracle bones [ca 1250-1046 BC] may also have had a calendrical notation. Counting and Numbering Hours, Days, Years While we take it for granted today, the crucial human requirement of capturing events and predicting future events based on your observations is a truly mind-blowing problem. It seems quite likely that much of our science, mathematics, and astronomy are a direct outgrowth of our attempts to make a reliable calendar. And as scientists learn more about measuring time, it becomes clear how enormously complex the problem truly is. For example, youd think figuring out how long a day was would be simple enoughbut we now know that the sidereal daythe absolute chunk of the solar yearlasts 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds, and is gradually lengthening. According to growth rings in mollusks and corals, 500 million years ago there may have been as many as 400 days per solar year. Our astronomical geek ancestors had to figure out how many days there were in a solar year  when the days and years varied in length. And in an attempt to know enough about the future, they did the same for a lunar yearhow often did the moon wax and wane and when does it rise and set. And those kinds of calendars arent migratable: sunrise and sunset occur at different times at different parts of the year and different places in the world, and the moons location in the sky is different for different people. Really, the calendar on your wall is a remarkable feat. How Many Days? Fortunately, we can track the failures and successes of that process through surviving, if patchy historical documentation. The earliest Babylonian calendar reckoned the year to be 360 days longthats why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes to an hour, 60 seconds to the minute. By about 2,000 years ago, societies in Egypt, Babylon, China, and Greece had figured out that the year was actually 365 days and a fraction. The problem becamehow do you deal with a fraction of a day? Those fractions built up over time: eventually, the calendar that you were relying on to schedule events and tell you when to plant became off by several days: a disaster. In 46 BC, the Roman ruler Julius Caesar established the Julian calendar, which was built solely on the solar year: it was instituted with 365.25 days and ignored the lunar cycle entirely. A leap day was built in every four years to account for the .25, and that worked pretty well. But today we know our solar year is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds long, which is not (quite) 1/4 of a day. The Julian calendar was off by 11 minutes per year, or a day every 128 years. That doesnt sound too bad, right? But, by 1582, the Julian calendar was off by 12 days and cried out to be corrected. Other Common Calendar Designations A.D.B.P.RCYBPcal BPA.H.B.C.E.C.E. Sources This glossary entry is part of the About.com Guide to Calendar Designations and the Dictionary of Archaeology. Dutka J. 1988. On the Gregorian revision of the Julian calendar. The Mathematical Intelligencer 30(1):56-64. Marshack A, and DErrico F. 1989. On Wishful Thinking and Lunar Calendars. Current Anthropology 30(4):491-500. Peters JD. 2009. Calendar, clock, tower. MIT6 Stone and Papyrus: Storage and Transmission. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richards EG. 1999. Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivan D. 1998. The Gezer Calendar and Northwest Semitic Linguistics. Israel Exploration Journal 48(1/2):101-105. Taylor T. 2008. Prehistory vs. Archaeology: Terms of Engagement. Journal of World Prehistory 21:1–18.

How to Write a Term Paper Quickly

How to Write a Term Paper Quickly How to Write a Term Paper Quickly Students writing an examination or a class assignment have various speeds of completing their tasks. There are students who will take less than half the period that has been allocated to complete a certain paper. When this happens, the other students commonly develop a certain rush to finish their assignments too and submit their papers. Instructors discourage this kind of action, citing that it can make one omit crucial information. In the same way, rushing to complete a term paper simply because your colleague has finished hers can make you spell words wrongly. Again, the important requirement of proofreading your final copy will be overlooked. It is a plus for a student to write his/her term paper quickly. This does not mean that you should rush your work, in so doing jeopardizing chances of getting a good score. Writing a term paper quickly is possible if one has grasped the elements of creative writing. One of these elements is to dedicate the first five minutes of a writing task to understand the topic and organize your concepts in a logical and coherent flow. To do this, you need to have a sheet of paper in which you will draft a rough sketch of your term paper. To some students, this is a time-wasting activity that is not necessary. The truth, however, is that writing an outline of your term paper will stimulate your brain to generate many ideas. Where these ideas are not written down, there is likelihood that they evade the mind of the student, and in the end, the writer will only have two points that do not offer enough breadth. You should not limit yourself when writing the rough sketch of your term paper. It is always advisable to put all ideas on paper, regardless of how absurd they might appear. You probably have started writing a paper with a single concept, but later realized that your mind generated many other theories from that single concept. If the writer keeps the topic in mind, every idea that is noted in the rough outline will form a paragraph, thus assisting the writer to write a detailed term paper. After doing the rough draft, your work will be to transfer the main ideas onto your clean copy. The task for the writer will be to add flesh to the skeleton provided in the outline, which should not be difficult at all. Instructors recommend that you should always tick off an idea out of your rough draft once you have incorporated it into the main document. Unless you do this, you might unconsciously repeat points, and your lecturer will penalize you for this. Modern learning institutions allow students to use computers to write their term papers. This technology makes the writing task even simpler and quicker. This is because the computer saves all your drafts, and highlights erroneous sections that require correction. Therefore, the only laborious part is drafting the first copy, and you can edit it in no time. If you need a custom term paper you can order it online from paper writing service. High quality, plagiarism-free and timely delivery guarantee!