Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire
English
By (author): Paul J. Kosmin
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 crownedFascinating.
Harpers
In the aftermath of Alexander the Greats 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 yearscontinuous and irreversiblebecame 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 Empires invention of a new kind of timeand the rebellions against this worldviewhad far reaching political and religious consequences, transforming the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future.
Without Paul Kosmins 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 antiquityA 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