Ankles deep in the past, but backs to the future
How did the ancient world organise deep time before the standardisation of the modern calendar?
For a historian in the Mediterranean antiquity trying to construct a universal history, there was a significant technical problem: how to align the divergent timelines of Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks into a single coherent narrative.
The solution, perhaps counterintuitively, was found in Scripture. The Old Testament provided the only available chronological backbone capable of supporting a long-distance view of the past.
While Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, expanded the geographical horizon of history to include the Persians and Egyptians, he lacked a continuous temporal framework extending back to the origins of society.
This is where the Christian chroniclers revolutionised the genre.
By the 4th century AD, Eusebius of Caesarea had operationalized the biblical narrative to create the Chronicon, a pioneering work of synchronization. He placed the erratic timelines of pagan nations alongside the linear, generation-by-generation precision of the Hebrew patriarchs.
When St. Jerome translated and expanded this work into Latin, he cemented the Bible as the definitive ruler for measuring human history. The sacred text ceased to be merely theological; it became the essential data set for investigating the roots of civilisation. All our sciences of the past, palaeontology, geology, evolutionary biology, etc, stem from this Greco-Judean convergence.
Yet, this obsession with foundational history exposes a fascinating asymmetry: the ancients had no equivalent rigour for the future.
Why did no universal historian attempt to forecast what lay ahead?
The closest the ancient world came to predictive sociology was Polybius. His theory of anacyclosis proposed a natural, rotating cycle of political forms: kingship inevitably corrupts into tyranny, which is overthrown by aristocracy, which degenerates into oligarchy, leading to democracy, and finally collapsing into mob rule before the cycle restarts. This was a bold attempt to model the future based on the past, yet it remained cyclical, not progressive.
Even apocalyptic literature, though technically future-focused, fails to qualify as historical speculation. Its visions were symbolic and transcendent, lifting the end of days out of the realm of human agency and into divine intervention.
The ancient historian stood with their back to the future, eyes fixed firmly on the genealogy of the past, ankles deep in deep time. They could tell you exactly how many years had passed since Abraham left Ur, but they had little interest in calculating what the world might look like tomorrow.