A section from the journey
Counting the Years: BCE, CE, and the Long Road
Two short labels will follow us the whole way: BCE and CE. They simply count the years from one shared point in time. CE years count forward; BCE years count backward, so a bigger BCE number is further in the past. And one lucky meeting of records lets us fix these dates for ancient India.
To walk a long road, it helps to count your steps. To walk a long timeline, we need to count the years. So let us learn the two small labels that will travel with us the whole way.
They are . You may know the older pair, BC and AD. The new pair marks the very same years, counted from the very same point. They are just worded so that people of every faith can share them comfortably.
CE years count forward, toward today, just as you would expect. This year, for us, is a CE year. The bigger the CE number grows, the closer it comes to now.
BCE years are the mirror. They count backward, away from that shared point and into the deep past. So a bigger BCE number means longer ago. The year 600 BCE is older than 300 BCE. Hold that gently; it is the one part that can trip a new reader.
One small oddity: there is no year zero. The count steps straight from 1 BCE to 1 CE. You will not need to do any sums — but now, when a date appears, you will know exactly what it means.
Now, a fair worry. Old Indian texts rarely stamp themselves with a plain date. So how do we fix any of this in time at all? The answer is a small piece of good luck, and it is worth knowing.
Long ago a Greek envoy named Megasthenes visited a powerful Indian court. The Greeks called its king Sandrokottos. Much later, scholars saw that this king was , a famous Indian ruler, around 300 BCE.
That one match is precious. It ties the Greek record, which we can date, to the Indian story, which we could not. From this firm post, other Indian dates can be measured out, forward and back. Some call it the anchor of Indian history.
Notice what just happened. Two faraway peoples, writing in two languages, left records that quietly touch. Where they touch, the past becomes firm. History often grows exactly there — where separate trails cross.
So now you are ready. You can read any date we meet. You know which way the years run. And you know that even the oldest of them rests on real, checkable ground. The long road is open before us.
To walk a timeline, we need a way to count the years. This book uses BCE and CE. They mark the same years as the older BC and AD, and they count from the very same point. CE years run forward toward today, the way you would expect. BCE years run backward, away from that point, so the bigger the BCE number, the longer ago it was: 600 BCE is older than 300 BCE. There is no year zero; the count goes from 1 BCE straight to 1 CE. One more thing helps. Indian texts rarely give plain dates, so for a long time the years were hard to pin down. The fix came from a Greek envoy named Megasthenes, who visited a king the Greeks called Sandrokottos. Scholars later saw that this was Chandragupta, a great Indian ruler, around 300 BCE. That single match links the two worlds and gives Indian history a firm post to tie its dates to.
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