[katana]

People in 238 BC marking a stele with that date certainly shows remarkable foresight.

Joking aside and just out of curiosity, it would have been interesting for them to say exactly how these people calculated and wrote the date. But I guess that's beyond what the writer could manage.

[Renfield]

In the ancient world, dates were usually expressed as the ordinal year of the current king's reign, i.e., "in the seventh year of Ptolemy's reign...". Archaeologists use these dates like tree-rings to work out a chronology system.