A Chinese port city known as Zayton (present-day Quanzhou) was home to a large, diverse Eurasian population during the period of Mongol rule from c. 1280-1368. Zayton encompassed Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and Christian churches. Yet within this cosmopolitan environment, differences in culture apparently were deeply felt. Consider this Christian epitaph written in Zayton in Syriac script in 1305:
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, forever, Amen. In the year one thousand six hundred and sixteen of the reckoning of Alexander the Great King, son of King Philip from the state of Macedonia, in the Year of the Dragon of the Chinese reckoning, on the sixteenth night of the ninth month in the congregation’s calendar, … [*]
The numbered year refers to the Seleucid era, which began in 311 BGC with the division of Alexander the Great’s empire. Persons living in Central Asia continued to use that Seleucid-era calendar after becoming Christians, after maintaining their Christian faith within a dominantly Islamic society, and after moving to China.
That the Gregorian / “common era” calendar is so widely used today is quite remarkable. Desire to get dates right for spiritual and ritual actions spurred rulers’ support for astronomers and astrologists. Jews divided bitterly over solar and lunar calendars. Considerable diversity in calendars existed among Christians in Europe through at least 800. How does our most uncommon era have an “common era” calendar? Perhaps persons today live more in the present and are less concerned with how to calculate and name past and future dates.
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Read more:
- common cosmic ideas from China to Mesopotamia
- looking east from the ancient Islamic world
- solar and lunar calendars in Jewish medical astrology
Source notes [*]: Inscription Z2r, trans. p. 261 in Eccles, Lance, Franzmann, Majella, Lieu, Sam, “Observations on select Christian inscriptions in the Syriac script from Zayton,” pp. 247-278 in Gardner, Iain, Samuel N. C. Lieu, and Kenneth Parry. 2005. From Palmyra to Zayton: epigraphy and iconography. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. .