What the Neutral Name Does and Does Not Change

Common Era and Before the Common Era are relabellings. They keep every number exactly where it was and change only the words attached to it, so a date written 1453 CE is the same date as 1453 in the older notation. The usage has a long history, appearing in Jewish scholarly writing in English well before it became general, for the obvious reason that a scholar who does not hold Jesus to be the Lord has a difficulty with an abbreviation that says so. It is now standard in academic publishing across many fields and in a growing number of general reference works, and it is resisted by others on the grounds that it obscures the calendar's origin without escaping it. Both observations are correct as far as they go.

The atlas uses CE and BCE throughout, and states plainly what that choice means: it is a convention about how to name years in a reference work that covers many religions and none, not a claim about what the years signify. The underlying reckoning remains the one Dionysius produced, the Christian liturgical calendar that generated it is catalogued here in its own right, and nothing about the numbering is neutral except the label. The atlas also carries the calendars that do not use it at all, Hebrew, Hijri, Vikram, Shaka, Buddhist and others, and where a date matters to a tradition in its own reckoning that reckoning is given alongside.