This year is 5777 in the Hebrew calendar. So someone has been counting for roughly that long.
Nitpick (as it doesn’t affect your general argument): What actually happened was at some point some king advisor or prophet applied some guesswork to oral history that bordered on myth (e.g. Noah living 950 years) and decided the world was created in 3761 BCE. This is, in fact, exactly the same logic used by creationists to date the Earth to be ~6000 years old. That’s the origin of the Hebrew calendar. There hasn’t been 5777 years of continuous counting. More like 3500, maybe.
There are poorly documented rumors running around on the net that the Yorùbá have a religious system that contains a chronological system that says our year 2017 is the year 10,059.
This claim deserves scrutiny rather than trust, and might stretch the idea of a calendar a bit...
It is very hard to find formal academic writing on the subject… Reading around various websites and interpolating, it seems that the cultural group was split in two by the Nigeria/Benin border and so I think there may be no single coherent state power that might back the calendar out of unifying nationalist sentiment. Also they may have no native word for “calendar”? Also it is a lunar calendar of 364 days and the intercalary adjustments might not be systematic and it may have been pragmatically abandoned in favor of the system the international world has mostly been standardizing on...
Still, I personally am interested not only in old surviving institutions but also in things that function as edge cases. Straining words like “old” or “surviving” or “institution”. The edge cases often help quite a bit to illustrate the optimization constraints and design pressures that go into very long running social practices :-)
Nitpick (as it doesn’t affect your general argument): What actually happened was at some point some king advisor or prophet applied some guesswork to oral history that bordered on myth (e.g. Noah living 950 years) and decided the world was created in 3761 BCE. This is, in fact, exactly the same logic used by creationists to date the Earth to be ~6000 years old. That’s the origin of the Hebrew calendar. There hasn’t been 5777 years of continuous counting. More like 3500, maybe.
There are poorly documented rumors running around on the net that the Yorùbá have a religious system that contains a chronological system that says our year 2017 is the year 10,059.
This claim deserves scrutiny rather than trust, and might stretch the idea of a calendar a bit...
It is very hard to find formal academic writing on the subject… Reading around various websites and interpolating, it seems that the cultural group was split in two by the Nigeria/Benin border and so I think there may be no single coherent state power that might back the calendar out of unifying nationalist sentiment. Also they may have no native word for “calendar”? Also it is a lunar calendar of 364 days and the intercalary adjustments might not be systematic and it may have been pragmatically abandoned in favor of the system the international world has mostly been standardizing on...
Still, I personally am interested not only in old surviving institutions but also in things that function as edge cases. Straining words like “old” or “surviving” or “institution”. The edge cases often help quite a bit to illustrate the optimization constraints and design pressures that go into very long running social practices :-)