For us, the year is 2020 CE, and everything BCE is counted in reverse. Obviously, people who actually lived during those times weren’t counting down to the biggest new year’s celebration of all time.
Did they keep track of years at all? I feel like counting years is mostly useful for historical record, as practically, it doesn’t really matter what year it is when you’re planting crops and building pyramids.
If they did keep track of years, was it different for different peoples? Say counting from the founding of that particular civilization or the reigning years of a ruler? Or was there a common reckoning they used once empires had formed and international trade/warfare became a thing?
All of this was brought on when I saw something about the pyramids being built in 2450 BCE, and wondered what that date might have looked like for the Egyptians at the time.
I’m not as familiar with Egypt, but both the Romans and the Greeks have a slightly different method of tracking time year to year than what we use, and they did keep track. While we track our years from a certain date (in this case our start point is actually 1 CE, since there’s no year zero), both Rome and Athens tied their years to their civic record keeping.
Ancient Athens tracked years by naming them for the person holding the eponymous archonship. The archonship was the top magistracy in ancient Athens, and one in particular was the one who gave his name to the year. The city kept records of who the eponymous archons were year to year so that if you needed to refer, for example, to the year of the start of the Second Persian War, 480/479 BCE (the Athenian year did not start at our January, so we can’t just translate years one-to-one), you would say that Xerxes invaded Greece during the archonship of Kalliades. Similarly, the Romans tracked their years by the two consuls who were in office and kept their own lists of who the consuls were every year. As long as you knew what year the year-namers were in office, you knew when a given event happened.
Later historiography combines the different systems. Diodorus Siculus, for instance, when he begins to write about Xerxes’ invasion, gives the year with the hefty description:
When Kalliades was archon in Athens, the Romans made Spurius Cassius and Proculus Verginius Tricostus consuls, and the seventy-fifth Olympiad was held by the Eleians, the one in which Astylus the Syracusan won the stadion.
He’s given three different year markers to identify the year we would call 480/479 BCE, and only one of the three (the Olympiad) is actually numeric.
There’s a joke Cassius Dio records that shows one of the downsides to the fact that you needed to know the people who - at least theoretically - held the most important offices for that year in order to place the date. By the Roman system of naming the year by consuls, 59 BCE was the year of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. But since by the end of the year Bibulus had withdrawn from the public sphere totally, Dio writes that as a joke people started to leave Bibulus’ name out entirely and just call it the "year of Gaius Caesar and Julius Caesar". It turned out you only needed the one name to know what year was being talked about.