This, as we all know, is the Year of Our Lord 2000. It has acquired this number because of the widespread acceptance throughout the modern world of the Christian calendar, a chronological system in which the years are assigned the cardinal numbers before or after the year of the birth of Christ.
But then, as we also know, if we did it properly this would really be somewhere between 2004 and 2007, depending on whom you believe on when Jesus Christ was really born.
Those of the Jewish religion, however, reckon the years by an entirely different rule. The Jewish calendar attempts to measure time from what might be called absolute zero, the date of the creation of the world. This is believed to have occurred in the year more widely known as 3760BC, which makes this the year 5760 by Jewish reckoning.
Muslims, too, have their own system. The basic date of the Islamic calendar is the Hejira, - the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in AD622, making 2000 the year 1420 in the world of Islam. The ancient Romans, on the other hand, preferred chauvinism to religion, and reckoned time from the date of the foundation of their city, which would make this 2753 ab urbe condita. . Then again, by the ancient Babylonian calendar this is the year 2749; by the first Egyptian calendar it is 6236; and according Buddhists it is 2544. It is the year 5119 in the current Maya great cycle, and according to the short-lived French revolutionary calendar it ought to be 208.
The Chinese, however, do things differently. Chinese tradition does not, in general, use Western numerals to count the years, but instead each year is popularly known by one of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac which, like the signs of the more familiar zodiac we associate with horoscopes, rotate in a fixed order.
The years' cycle begins with the Year of the Rat, followed by the years of the Ox, the Tiger, the Hare, the Dragon and the Serpent; the second half of the duodecade begins with the Year of the Horse, and after the Monkey, the Cock, the Dog and the Boar, the Year of the Rat comes around again once more.
The festival Yuan Tan, , the Chinese New Year, begins with the second new moon after the winter solstice, which constrains it to fall somewhere between January 21st and February 19th on our Gregorian calendar. This year the event begins today, and for Chinese communities around the world the Year of the Hare is over, and the Year of the Dragon has begun.