In many western countries the years are calculated by taking the point of reference the birth of Christ And, for this reason we talk about “B.C.” And “A.D.“. But what not everyone knows is that between the year 1 AC and 1 DC There is no zero yearwe pass directly from one to the other. But why is there a year missing? To understand it we have to go back in time and go to see who has decided to score the passage of time in this way.
Because we count the years starting from the birth of Christ
For many centuries, each civilization has independently chosen how to organize their calendars: i Maya, For example, they used complex cycles based cycles, while a Rome The years were counted starting from Foundation of the city. But things began to change with Dionigi the little oneChristian monk who lived in the capital between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the 6th century. He proposed a new system for the counting of the years based not on the foundation of Rome but on the birth of Christ.
It might seem to us a obvious thing, but for the time it was a real revolution. The only problem was date the exact birth of Jesus: in the Bible no Roman references are indicated and therefore the only way to find a “zero year” was that of compare The events narrated in the sacred text with what is reported by the historians of the time. In the end, after a careful research and intersection of the data, the monk came to the conclusion that Christ was born in 753 from the Foundation of Rome And that that, from now on, would have been the beginning of the calendar.
So that was chosen as a zero year … or maybe not?
The lack of the year zero
We might think that Dionigi the little one he fixed the birth of Christ as The first day of the year zerobut it wasn’t. In fact, at the time in Europe the concept of “zero number“It still did not exist: a few centuries will come ahead thanks to the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. At the time, therefore, it was logical go from 1 before Christ to 1 after Christwithout anything in the middle. So there is no year zero In our calendar, even if this expression has entered the common language.
Obviously the adoption of this model took time and certainly did not happen one day to the next, even if after several centuries it began to become more popular, so much so that it was today the system adopted in most of the world. Among other things, small curiosity, more recent studies have confirmed that the date identified by Dionysius the little one for the birth of Christ would actually be from anticipate four years. However, the model is thus rooted within our society that it makes its modification substantially impossible.
