ABSTRACT
Few dates in human history have aroused more eager anticipation than the year AD 2000. As the Millennium approached, nations around the world appointed committees, commissions, offices and foundations to take charge of matters and make proposals about appropriate ways to celebrate this auspicious event. There was effectively no precedent on which they could draw. In AD 1000, the only parallel, there was little sense of the beginning of a new era. Indeed it was not until the sixteenth century that stories began to circulate about the apprehension, even terror, apparently felt by tenth-century society about the dawn of the second millennium and the imminence of the apocalypse (Briggs and Snowman, 1996, 3). By the 1990s, however, ideas about chronology and its significance in human history had changed dramatically. The dawn of the third millennium, with the additional ‘historical, religious and anthropological freight’ that the word ‘millennium’ now carried (ibid., 1), made this a historical milestone. It positively demanded appropriate recognition.
