Our Own Common Era

It is the unheralded ancestor of every subsequent era system, including the Christian Anno Domini system, our own Common Era, the Jewish Era of Creation, the Islamic Hijrah, the French Revolutionary Era, and so on.

(further down)

All events, however dislocated, were part of a single story, a total history. 

These observations are from an Aeon essay by Paul J. Kosmin of Harvard College who is John L Loeb associate professor of the humanities, specialising in the history of the Ancient Greek world, at Harvard University in Massachusetts. His most recent book is Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire(2018)

Are you sitting comfortably; this won’t take long. What do you notice about the group of dating systems mentioned above? Most of the numbers are different except for two: A.D. and C.E. Correct. That leads us to suspect that they may be part of “a single story” as Kosmin says himself. What has caused the break in acronym? Can it be that “our own C.E.” represents ‘under new management’? Fine but shouldn’t this new regime have a starting date? When would it be? Very difficult problem even for a Harvard prof specialising in time. Really hard problem. Let’s just cancel the history of dating instead.