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- PARIS (AFP) - Hundreds of
millions of
people all over the world will be celebrating the start of
the third
millennium on January 1, 2000. And they all will be wrong. That's
official.
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- Officials at Britain's Greenwich Observatory, guardians
of the
line of zero longitude, and at its American counterpart the US Naval
Observatory, are categorical: the end of the second millennium and the
beginning of the third will be reached on January 1, 2001.
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- In a century of 100
years, century's end logically comes
at the end of the 100th year, and
as a result the millennium festivities
commencing in just over 10 weeks
time will be exactly a year early.
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- The reason for this is that
there was no year zero in
the AD (Anno Domini, "in the year of our
Lord") calendar created
by the sixth-century monk Dionysius
Exiguus (Dennis the Short), and the
millennium started out with the
year 1 AD.
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- However logic will take second place to the popular feeling
that a year designated by such a round figure as 2000 is a more suitable
starting point for a new millennium, not to mention the commercial
imperative
to cash in.
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- The money-making opportunites provided by the
date-change
have been such as to prompt Lord Falconer, Britain's
minister in charge
of the Millennium Dome -- the huge dome under
construction east of London
-- to observe earlier this year that the
British would be "proper
Charlies" if they waited till 2001
to mark the millennium.
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- It was very different 100 years ago. Virtually every
important public celebration heralding the 20th century was held on or
just before January 1, 1901.
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- Daily newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals ran
their first numbers of the century in the first days of 1901, and the
previous
year had been firmly earmarked as the closing chapter of the
old era rather
than the opening chapter of the new.
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- The lead headline of
the New York Times on January 1,
1901 read: "Twentieth Century's
Triumphant Entry".
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- There had been prominent advocates, Sigmund Freud and
Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm among them, for starting the new century a year
earlier in line with popular sentiment, but they made little headway
against
the consensus that then prevailed among
decision-makers.
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- The result has been that the 20th century, about to be
declared
dead by popular command, has lasted only 99 years.
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- Disputes over when to mark the
endof the century have
a history going back at least 300 years.
-
- Historian Hillel
Schwartz, in his book "Century's
End", traces the first major
hassles to the period 1699-1701, while
in the late 1790s the letters
pages in newspapers in the English-speaking
world conducted a lively
debate on the subject.
-
- But it was in the 1890s that the controversy reached
its peak. Science writer Stephen Jay Gould notes in "Questioning the
Millennium" that the schism between the "high culture" view
-- that the new century begins when the double-zero year is over -- and
the "popular view" favouring a round-number year emerged most
clearly at this time.
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- January 1, 1900 was the popular choice for the start
of the 20th century, as evidenced by a typical letter to the press cited
by Schwartz: "I defy the most bigoted precisian to work up an
enthusiasm
over the year 1901, when we will already have had twelve
months' experience
of the 1900s."
-
- A century on, the "bigoted
precisians" have
been relegated to the margins in the stampede to
herald the new millennium
at the earliest possible date.
-
- But Gould notes that
the "century-end" date
dispute is an arbitrary problem in any
case, to which an arbitrary solution
is perfectly appropriate.
-
- And adds that for the
purist both sides are wrong.
-
- Dennis the Short almost certainly miscalculated in
establishing
his benchmark, since there is objective evidence that
Christ was born at
least four years before the start of the calendar
which bears his name.
-
- This means that the second millennium of his birth
happened
some time around 1995, and the upcoming celebrations are
somewhat late.
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