Winner of the Runciman Award Winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award
"Tells the story of how the Seleucid Empire revolutionized
chronology by picking a Year One and counting from there, rather
than starting a new count, as other states did, each time a new
monarch was crowned...Fascinating." -Harper's In the aftermath of
Alexander the Great's conquests, his successors, the Seleucid
kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and
Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to
impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucus I introduced a linear
conception of time. Time would no longer restart with each new
monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years-continuous and
irreversible-became the de facto measure of historical duration.
This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire and
identical to the system we use today, changed how people did
business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger
world. Some rebellious subjects, eager to resurrect their
pre-Hellenic past, rejected this new approach and created
apocalyptic time frames, predicting the total end of history. In
this magisterial work, Paul Kosmin shows how the Seleucid Empire's
invention of a new kind of time-and the rebellions against this
worldview-had far reaching political and religious consequences,
transforming the way we organize our thoughts about the past,
present, and future. "Without Paul Kosmin's meticulous
investigation of what Seleucus achieved in creating his calendar
without end we would never have been able to comprehend the traces
of it that appear in late antiquity...A magisterial contribution to
this hitherto obscure but clearly important restructuring of time
in the ancient Mediterranean world." -G. W. Bowersock, New York
Review of Books "With erudition, theoretical sophistication, and
meticulous discussion of the sources, Paul Kosmin sheds new light
on the meaning of time, memory, and identity in a multicultural
setting." -Angelos Chaniotis, author of Age of Conquests
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