Time

1. Dating Historical Events: Without calendars and relative dating methods, historical events have no relative connections and no relevance. A business appointment between two or more people only has culpability if all parties have a reliable and similar basis of time allowing them to all appear at the same place at the same time.

Ancient historical events have the same need of a reliable dating method, i.e. calendars. As important as calendars are to history books, it is amazing that more historians don't spend more time in discussing the many varieties of calendars throughout history. In our western history books, it is assumed the Julian/Gregorian calendar is the basis for dating historical events. Events that are dated before 44 B.C. are based on the proleptic Julian calendar or the "pretend" calendar, since the calendar didn't exist at the time of the event.

2. Measurement of Time: The standard physical aspects of time (day, year, or season) have been known to every society. Each society has measured these aspects and divided them or grouped them by different methods. The Western Calendar (Julian or Gregorian) is not the same calendar as the Hebrew or the Islamic Calendar. Some calendars are lunar based, some solar based, some empirical (static without regard to the motions of the earth), and or a combination of the three. The ancient Aztecs even had a Venus based calendar.

Matching the different calendars to achieve accurate historical dates based on the different calendars can be tricky. One of the best ways to do this is to count days, but even this allows some degree of error in matching a date from an ancient Babylonian Calendar to a modern Gregorian calendar date. There are mainly 3 known systems for counting days, and all three are very similar, usually with different "Epochs" or starting dates.

2a. Julian Day Count: This system is not named after the calendar system of the same name but was devised by Joseph Scaliger who named the system after his father, Julian Scaliger. By calculating known cycles of time back to a beginning point where they all converged, he decided that the starting point for counting days should be Jan 1, 4713 B.C. (This matches to Nov 24, 2712 B.C. in the Gregorian calendar). This becomes his Epoch. The Epochs for most calendars are given in Julian/Gregorian dates for Western statistics. Jan 1, 4713 B.C. became Day 1.

2b. Lillian Day Count: Pope Gregory decreed that the Julian Calendar should be corrected as astronomers of his time declared that the calendar was 11 days off from the astronomical placement of earth. The official change took place on Oct 4, 1582 A.D. The next day after the 4th was declared to be the 11th, so there was no 5th through 10th of October in this year. Since the Julian Day count proved to be successful for many reasons, it was thought that a similar system should be declared, called the Lilian Day Count. Day 1 of the Lillian Day Count is equivalent to day 2299160 J.D. This removes errors that can take place over long periods of times in many algorithms by bringing the time down more measurable lengths.

2c. Rata Dies Count: A more modern approach, created by Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz came about because of the inaccuracy of the algorithms over long periods of times. In their system, the time periods are divided in half to decrease the algorithmic errors. They assigned Jan 1, 1 A.D. as their Day 1 (equivalent to J.D. 1721425.5). The reason for the .5 is that they decided that midnight would be a better time to start their count. The Julian Day count changes at noon each day.

2d. Dies Torah Count: This system is derived from the Biblical Epoch of Creation Day being day 1, which is estimated to be Mar 22, 3963 B.C. or 273685 J.D. or -1,447,340.5 R.D. This is the main method of counting days used in this work. It must be noted that due to the shift in the earth's motion around 715 B.C., counting days accurately after this point has many pitfalls and can't be used to accurately count the days to the end of the 7000 years of history predicted by the Bible. The Hebrew orthodox does not believe that counting days is legal and thus they refrain from doing so.

2e. Start of Day for different cultures: Our western day has traditionally started at Midnight, but that is not true with all cultures. In Israel, the start of the day is the time around 6 P.M. or the beginning of the night time, dusk. In ancient Egypt, the start of the day was around 6 A.M. or the beginning of the light of day, dawn.

The Julian Day Count system created by Scaliger, he assigned to start at Noon, which is why the J.D. counts usually include a .5 in the count (half a day). The Rata Dies count uses Midnight to match that of the western culture, as does the Lilian Day Count. The Dies Torah count uses the traditional Biblical definition of the day where the night starts each day (6 P.M.), (dusk as in the Hebrew culture).

Time of Start of each Day by a few calendars and systems: This makes a huge difference when trying to match days from one calendar to the other.

2f. Start of the Year for different cultures: Archaeological finds that define ancient calendars (i.e. Egypt, Israel, Babylon, India, and even Greece) show that all cultures around the globe started their year on the Spring Equinox. All the calendars had their day 1 on the Gregorian Date of March 21. It must be added here that ALL cultures of that time used a calendar of 360 days. Historians have declared that the ancients used a calendar in error of the cosmological system that we now know as they believe the solar system has remained unchanged for millions of years. There is a considerable amount of proof to show that our modern historians and scientists are in error, as will be shown.

The Hebrews, when they began to compile a more modern version of their history around 200 A.D. moved the beginning of the year to Tishrei 1 or around the Autumnal Equinox. Even after the cultures of the world modified their calendars to add 5 days to the year, (between 700 B.C. and 600 B.C.) they continued to use the Spring Equinox as the start of the year.

The first Julian calendar (separate from the Julian Day count) adopted by Augustus Cesar and made official in 8 A.D. originally started in March as well, with March being the 1st month. January and February months added at the last were numbered 11 and 12. Early in the history of the Roman year (Julian calendar) they moved the start of the calendar to January 1st.

The idea that the original calendar makers were in error is in itself error prone as these same ancient astronomers were able to calculate pi to 10 decimal places without a computer and it would have been impossible for them to miss the fact that their calendar was moving by 5 days each year. No adjustments of ancient calendars were ever recorded. The only changes known throughout the ancient world took...