WHAT YEAR IS IT? The Jewish calendar says this year is 5772. According to Islam, it's 1433. “Huh? Wha? I thought it was 2012.” You probably haven't thought much about calendars. Pause for a second, think about it, and you'll realize that ways of counting years is something that humans made up. The earth doesn't know that it's the year 2012. In fact, if our calendar was based on the age of the earth, we'd have to say it's the year 7,892,115,476 or something like that. After all the earth has been around for 6 to 10 billion years. If our calendar was based on the age of humans, we'd have to say it's the year 2,320,512 or something like that. Humans have been around for 1-2 million years. If our calendar was based on the beginning of civilization, we would have to say that it's the year 10,397ish. Humans first started farming, built cities, and established complex civilizations about 10,000 years ago. You've never heard of a calendar based on those things. So what are calendars based on? What have other civilizations used as the year “0”? The Greeks started their calendar with the first Olympics. The first year was Year One in the First Olympiad. (On our calendar that year was 776 B.C.E.) The Romans started their years when the twins Romulus and Remus built the city of Rome. (On our calendar, that year was 753 B.C.E.) So why is this year, the year 2012? 2,012 is the number of years since the birth of Jesus Christ. This method of naming the years was invented 500 years ago by a Christian monk named Gregory. It's called the Gregorian Calendar. He started counting at zero in the year that Jesus was born. The years before zero were called the years “Before Christ” or as you've seen it “B.C.” (So 3012 years ago would be called 1,000 B.C.) The years after zero he labeled “Anno Domini” which means in the year of our lord. So we are currently in the year 2012 A.D. Or as Gregory would say it, “2012 in the year of our lord.” As you can see, this way of labeling the years is very Christian centric. It's a Christian centric calendar, but it's widely used around the world by people of all religions. We now call it the civil calendar (to distinguish it from religious calendars). In the past 20 years, historians have changed the labels to make it slightly less Christian centric. We now refer to the years before zero as “Before the Common Era” or B.C.E. and the years after zero as the “Common Era” or C.E. So what about the Jewish years 5772 and the Muslim year 1433. Judaism calculated the year zero by adding up the ages of all the descendants of Adam and Eve described in the Bible. This set the year zero as the year of the Biblical creation. 3,760 years before the birth of Jesus, according to the Bible. 1433 is the number of years since Muhammad left Mecca for Medina. That event is called the hegira. It's considered the beginning of Islam and it happened 1433 years ago. AM = Anno Mundi = year of the world AH = Anno Hegirae = year of the Hijra