Library › Latin: Didactic & Technical › Computatio
This very short anonymous note sets out the number of years from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, following the reckoning of Orosius. It states that 5,199 years passed from the beginning of the world to the Nativity, made up of 4,447 years from the creation to the founding of Rome and 752 years from the founding of Rome to the birth of Christ. It ends by noting that from that point the years of the Lord are counted. The whole text is only a few sentences long, and Migne printed it in a volume of works associated with Bede.
Notes of this kind were copied in manuscripts of chronicles and computistical works to give readers a fixed frame of world chronology. The figure of 5,199 years, which derives from Eusebius and Jerome and was passed on by Orosius, was the most widely used Latin reckoning before Bede proposed a shorter one based on the Hebrew text. The note is thus a small but clear witness to the older chronology that circulated in the early medieval West. Its author and date are unknown.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 94, Parisiis 1850), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.