![]() Worse, he had lost several years fleeing a wave of civil unrest that swept the region. He was also involved in a vitriolic exchange in Bukhara with the young Ibn Sina, who later gained fame for his Canon of Medicine. But Biruni was a stranger to history and had never studied the many foreign cultures that had developed their own systems of time. Just 29 years old, he had written half a dozen papers on astronomy and geodesics. Abu Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni (973-1039) was an unlikely figure to take up so abstruse a task. This, then, was the situation in the year 1000, when a largely unknown Central Asian scholar from Kath in the far west of modern Uzbekistan confronted the problem of history and time. ![]() Having himself defected to the Roman side, he employed Roman chronology throughout his The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews and felt no need to correlate that system with the calendar of the Jews. Similarly, the Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37-100) took as his subject the interaction of Jews and Romans, two peoples with markedly different understandings of time. This made his dates intelligible to Romans and Greeks but unintelligible to everyone else. Instead he shoehorned all dates into the four-year units of the Olympiads. Other ancient thinkers came as far as Herodotus, but no further. The Roman historian Polybius (200-118 BC) penned what he called a Universal History, embracing much of the Middle East, but he passed over differing concepts of history and time. Herodotus had come closer to perceiving the need for a world history than anyone before him. Each was so immersed in the particularities of its own culture that it would never have occurred to them to enquire into how other peoples might view historical time. The same could be said for the other peoples of the ancient world. Herodotus and other Greeks of the Classical age were curious about the larger world, but ultimately their subject was Greece and they remained content to view the world through their own calendar. The structure of his Histories allowed ample space for digressions that would inform or amuse his readers, but differing concepts of time were not among them. Yet for two reasons the broad-minded Herodotus, whom Cicero called ‘the Father of History’, stopped short of asking how one might coordinate or integrate the Egyptian and Greek systems of time and history, or those of any other peoples.įor all his interest in diverse peoples and cultures, Herodotus wrote for a Greek audience. His implication is that all customs and traditions are relative. He reports admiringly on how the Egyptians maintained lists of their kings dating back 341 generations. He explains how each culture preserves and protects its own history. ![]() Throughout his Histories he regales his readers with exotica gleaned from his extensive travels and enquiries. The ancient Greeks pioneered the systematic study of history and, even today, Herodotus (c.484-425 BC) stands out for his omnivorous curiosity about other peoples and cultures. Even when they acknowledged a common point in time, as did both Greeks and Persians with the birth of Alexander the Great, they differed about when that event took place. Each designated its own starting point for historical time, be it the Creation, Adam and Eve or some later event, such as the biblical Flood. It was not always the case. Most countries, cultures or religious groups have lived according to their own calendars. Without it, temporal comparisons across cultures and traditions would be impossible. It is no exaggeration to say that this common understanding of time and our common calendar system are the keys to world history. This single global calendar enables us to place events everywhere on a single timeline. Thanks to this, it is possible to readily translate dates from the Chinese calendar, or from the Roman, Greek or Mayan, into the same chronological system that underlies the histories of, say, Vietnam or Australia. But for most practical matters, including government, commerce and science, the world employs a single common calendar. Muslims, Jews and Chinese each have their own calendars and celebrate their own New Year’s Day. Today, it is taken for granted that ‘World History’ exists.
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