How Empire Bequeathed to us our Threefoldly Awesome Modern New Year's Celebrations
Thoughts on the paradoxical roots of the Unity, Democracy, and Historical Consciousness we (implicitly) celebrate
Two and a half millennia ago, pretty much everything about our new year’s celebrations would have been utterly foreign. Indeed, much of what makes new year’s what it is today would have been quite foreign just a century ago. One aspect of this is that with the diffusion of various modern communication technologies and the standardization of time zones, we now synchronously experience the new year again and again as it rolls across the globe hour-by-hour.
But our global celebration is remarkable in ways that can truly be appreciated only if we go much further back in time, to the ancient world. When we do that, we come to realize two things:
a) Our new year’s is remarkable in three ways that we now see as highly positive. IN particular, it reflects:
A high degree of social unity
A high degree of democracy;
A high degree of historical consciousness.
b) Ironically, although empires are very unpopular today, all three of these beneficial aspects of the new year’s experience result from imperial interventions that eventually came to be repurposed by us common folk. The ironic upshot is that as a result of the calendrical changes that are reflected in new year’s day, the world now has something of a unified global culture— a sort of democratic empire.
To elaborate:
First off, the origins of calendars lie in schedules used by public officials for coordinating legal, political, and public affairs; moreover, all such affairs were originally highly local. Originally, every society that had a calendar with precise dates had an idiosyncratic calendar particular to that society, and such societies tended to be very small. As Sacha Stern discusses, each Greek polity (prior to Alexander) had its own names for the (lunar) months, recognized new months & years at different times etc. This echoes the period before the arrival of the railroads when every town had its version of “solar time.” Just as it didn’t matter what time it was in Detroit when you were in Chicago (what does that mean even?), it didn’t matter what month it was in Sparta if you were in Athens.
It was only with the rise of (Mesopotamian and then Persian, then Hellenistic) empires that common calendars started to be used across large territorial expanses encompassing heterogeneous cultures. This catalyzed at least one non-imperial effort as well, in the case of the Hebrew Calendar (with efforts made to unify the holiday schedule of Judeans/Jews who’d been scattered across the Near East & Mediterranean by the Babylonian empire).
Fast forward to today. Our global civil calendar had been adopted pretty much worldwide by the turn of the twentieth century, as a result of world dominance by Western, Christian empires. But now, with these empires largely gone from the world stage (replaced by significant cultural imperialism, to be sure, as well as American hegemony), what remains— as signified by rolling new year’s celebrations across the planet— is a more unified world community than at any time in history. Those rolling new year’s celebrations could not happen without such unification around our common civil calendar.
Finally, it’s my impression also that the last generation or so has also seen rising appreciation for the wide variety of local calendars— e.g., Islamic, East Asian, Hindu, Hebrew— that are still maintained by regional subcultures, even as they also observe the global civil calendar. This seems to reflect the fact that once empire has receded, the institutions that remain are generally softened and integrated into a more tolerant, multicultural world.
This brings us to the second positive dimension to our modern new year’s celebrations: that they are highly democratic. The delicious irony is that once again this is the product of imperial intervention; indeed, this goes back to the world’s most famous case where a “democracy died”— the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. (Again, see Stern!)
Before the introduction of the Julian Calendar (later slightly adjusted to become the Gregorian), the lunar calendars that dominated the ancient calendars were highly political. Kings &/or priests would decide on the dates of new moons & new years & the subjects had to follow their lead. Sometimes these decisions were for the public welfare (e.g., maybe a festival would be delayed because of a war) but sometimes not (debt payments could be delayed that way too…); either way, calendars were political tools, implicitly symbolizing the fact that the people were subject to the diktat of the powerful.. But ironically, perhaps the ancient world’s most impactful king (Julius Caesar) introduced a calendar that (once widely adopted and institutionalized) was more powerful than any king, thus eliminating a tool from the arsenal of the powerful: our civil calendar is now a fully democratic schedule. It belongs to all of us now, with no government having the wherewithal to change it.
So due to empire, we have come to have a unified, democratic global calendar. And empire is also responsible for the last distinguishing feature of our civil calendar. This feature is perhaps the one we most take for granted. It is the feature that makes the calendar suitable for narrating history— not only the stories of the powerful but those of the individuals, families, and peoples we are and we love. I’m talking about an obscure invention discussed by Paul Kosmin in his path-breaking book: what we might call “continuous year” or “era” counting.
Ancient calendars all restarted their count of years whenever there was a political transition (Year 1 of King X, Year 2 of King X, etc.). The Hebrew Bible appears to be the first to deviate from this pattern, as it introduces a calendar where year 1 is the Exodus & year 480 is the building of Solomon’s Temple. But this count seems to have been purely symbolic with the main count for civil affairs being the number of years of a king’s reign.
This idea of era counting really got going though with one of the two great Hellenistic empires of the last third of the 1st millennium BCE, the Seleucids. As Kosmin documents, this empire introduced a system for political transition that effectively diminished the importance of a new king relative to the empire. It also promoted the Seleucid year count throughout the empire (e.g., on official seals) so that it became widely known and used. Indeed, Kosmin marshals evidence that “Seleucid Time” was widely resented and resisted. Yet it apparently had a transformative effect on the cultures it touched (it is referenced centuries after the Seleucids were gone, both in the Talmud and in China), eventually leading people around the world to think of themselves as participating in long-term historical processes. With the crumbling of the Seleucid Empire, the idea spread throughout the world leading to the emergence all the various counts in use, including that attached to the common/Christian era (and used for all kinds of purposes, including by scientists and historians).
Kosmin invites us to ponder how we would think of ourselves, how we would conduct our lives if we didn’t have an historical timeline upon which to narrate our past, present, and futures. And imagine if we didn’t have a common time line by which we could compare notes about synchronous events in the past (did you know Shakespeare died a few years before the Pilgrims landed?) and coordinate disparate plans for the future (let’s all get together for our 25th reunion)!
Again, what was once a tool for projecting imperial power was eventually transformed into a unifying, popular standard— in this case, one that has completely reshaped how we— as individuals, as groups, and beyond— think of ourselves in time. Indeed, who among us would want to think of ourselves in any other way?
Conclusion
The fact that acts of arbitrary imperial power centuries— even millennia— ago has bequeathed to us a calendar that carries with it important benefits we now take for granted hardly means that “empire is good.” Indeed, one could argue that this three-fold story is more one about how the designs of the powerful are eventually subverted to become tools and practices that are better adapted for human flourishing. Yet at the same time, these subversions were largely unconscious and organic; there are no revolutions in the stories of how these features of our calendars came to become so valued by us.
And so as we celebrate with renewed appreciation for the unifying, democratic, and historically conscious world culture we all participate in, we should also be humbled by the fact that human history works in mysterious ways and that human social practices and technologies do not have fixed meaning. For me anyway, this is a useful antidote to the social media- driven tendency to declare (shout, even…) our interpretation of current events with a high degree of confidence as to their meaning.
And as we say good-bye to 2023 and express our hopes for better times in 2024 even as so many difficulties and hardships are casting a heavy shadow, we should celebrate the fact that at least over the long run, we tend to figure things out in ways that make the world better.
Happy new year!
P.S. I’m still trying to figure out a good schedule for posting new essays on this Substack. I hope to do part b of “Why is the Israel-Palestine Conflict So Intractable?” by Sunday January 7th.