Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of "eras" — that is, of time-reckonings that begin at some event felt as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most important is the generic Aramæan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the "Seleucid era." It was followed by many others, amongst them the Sabæan (about 115 B.C), the starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian; the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by the Synedrion in 346;[1] the Persian, from the accession of the last Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro's "ab urbe condita"; that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion's breach with the Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500 and beginning with the birth of Jesus.
World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as "the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time." The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man — acts of God of mighty magic — and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a whole series of such æons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation of the end of the existing one.[2] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day — the view over a given time. "The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts — world-beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the "life" of man.
- ↑ B. Cohn, "Die Anfangsepoche der jüd. Kalenders" (Sitz. Pr. Akad., 1914). The date of the first day of Creation was on this occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun — of course with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the articles "Chronology," "Calendar," in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ The Persian notion of total time is 12,000 years. The Parsees of to-day consider A.D. 1920 as the 11,550th.
