Worshiping Chronos

“Dating History: The Renaissance and the Reformation of Chronology” by Anthony Grafton, in Daedalus (Spring 2003), 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

“We look up the dates of events in biblical and classical history,” observes Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton Univer­sity, “and rarely worry how this knowledge was obtained.” But chronology—the study of when events occurred in historical time—was once “a cutting-edge interdisciplinary field of study. In Europe’s great age of unrestrained, exuberant learning, it attracted the most learned writers of them all.”

Working through ancient texts in Hebrew, Greek, and Egyptian, scholars toiled during the Renaissance to define the order of events from Earth’s creation to their own time. Printed chronologies enjoyed enormous popularity. Denys Petau’s On the Reckoning of Time (1627), for instance, went through dozens of editions. But just as the discoveries of explorers in the New World were forcing cartographers to redraw ancient maps, chronol­ogers began finding that texts of the classical world held secrets that threat­ened to unravel the standard notions of historical time.

All civilizations have attempted what Vol­taire once dismissed as “the sterile science of facts and dates,” but the results have only been as sound as the sources. Most useful are rec­ords that link descriptions of events to astro­nomical ob­ser­vations—the passage of comets, for instance, or the phases of the moon. The sophisticated calendars of the Aztecs impressed even their Span­­ish conquerors. In Europe, Renais­sance chronologers faced a particular challenge. Not only had many ancient records been destroyed—as was the case in the city of Rome—but scholars also were forced to accept biblical notions of time as sacred and true. There was one big problem: The Greek and Hebrew Bibles did not agree on chronology. Working backward from the birth of Christ, and forward from the moment of the Creation—as European chronologers did from the 13th century onward—the Hebrew text suggested that the Creation occurred in 5200 b.c., the Greek, around 4000. (English archbishop James Ussher famously arrived at the precise date of 4004 B.C.)

Into this perplexing mess stepped a remarkable scholar, a Huguenot named Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609). Work­ing what Grafton describes as “bibliographical and philological miracles,” this “most arrogant as well as the most learned of men” relied on his knowledge of ancient languages and astronomy to fix dates from the fall of Troy to the fall of Constan­tinople. He was the first to establish a “coherent, solid structure” of historical time, “basically the one that scholars still use.”

Scaliger’s greatest achievement may have been to reveal the painstaking discoveries of a third-century chronologer, Eusebius of Caesarea (in present-day Israel), compiled in two volumes. The first, Grafton reports, contained “a vast amount of information, some of it quite worrying to a Christian reader,” including chronologies of ancient Egypt and Babylon. The second contained “something that seems to have been new: a comparative table of world history from the birth of Abraham onward”—showing no dates, but correlating events in the history of the world’s great empires. St. Jerome had translated Euseb­ius’s second book into Latin in the fourth century (ignoring the troubling first book). But until Scaliger came across the two volumes in 1602, no one seems to have wondered why Abra­ham’s birth coincided with the 17th Egyptian dynasty. As Scaliger realized, tracing backward from this coincidence led to the inescapable conclusion that the kingdom of Egypt had existed before Creation.

Scaliger’s revelations touched off debates that lasted for hundreds of years. Dissenters used the evidence to discredit the Bible, while other scholars got so bogged down in arguing about niggling details of Egyptian and Chinese chronology that Voltaire and the other philosophes centuries later came to see chronology as a “synonym for sterile pedantry.” Time had finally passed chronology by.