Geoscience Reference
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published. Having done this, one can see that Ussher's pronounce-
ments on the date of Creation which appear on the first page of his
1650 Annales are straightforward:
In PRINCIPIO creavit DEUS Cœlum & Terram. [Genes.I.i] quod
temporis principium (juxta nostram Chronologiam) incidit in
noctis illius initium, quæ XXIII. diem Octobris praecessit, in
anno Periodi Julianæ 710.
which was translated into English in 1658 as:
In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, Gen.1.v. 1. Which
beginning of time, according to our chronologie, fell upon the
entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of Octob,in
the year of the Julian Calendar, 710.
and Ussher noted that the first full day was Sunday 23 October, and
this was when God created the angels. The year 710
JP
is equivalent to
4004
BC
. The Julian Period was a timescale of 7,980 years devised in
1583 by Joseph Justus Scaliger, which was based on the Julian Calendar
but from which he had removed the effects of solar and lunar cycles.
The number 7,980 was derived by multiplying 19 (the length of the
solar cycle) by 19 (the length of the lunar or Metonic cycle) and multi-
plying the product by 15 (the length of the Roman taxation cycle
known as the Indiction). The Julian Day counts days from 1 January
4713
BC
, the origin of the Julian Period, and so by 30 June 2005
2,453,551 Julian Days had elapsed. The year 4713
BC
was chosen by
Scaliger as the starting point of the Julian Period as this was the last
time that the three cycles began together.
So what Ussher actually said was that Creation took place dur-
ing the evening of Saturday 22 October 4004
BC
, but he did not men-
tion the exact time of day.
In both the 1650 and 1658 versions, Ussher lists dates as mar-
ginal notes on every page, and gives these in three different ways
(Figure
2.3
). The left-hand column lists the dates as 'The year of the
World'. These begin at 1 and increase throughout the topic, while on
