Measuring the distance to the past
Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia dates from c.4000 BCE. The Inca city of Cuzco was founded around 1200 CE. Without a shared system, it is hard to tell how far apart these dates are. In fact they sit about 5,200 years apart. From today, 4000 BCE is roughly 6,000 years ago.
Historians need a shared way of writing dates so that anyone, anywhere, can tell which event came first and how much time lies between them. With that system you can see that Ancient Egypt and the Minoans on Crete both began around 3000 BCE, so they existed at the same time. You can also see that the Inca came thousands of years after the Egyptians and Sumerians.
The skills that make this possible are:
- reading BCE and CE dates, including counting backwards
- grouping years into decades, centuries and millennia
- understanding the calendar the dates are measured in
- dividing the past into named periods
- drawing a timeline to scale
The order in which events happened, and the study of how to arrange events in that order.
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