|This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original
article was at Epoch (reference date). The list of authors can
be seen in the page history. As with the Calendar Wikia, the
text of Wikipedia is available under Creative Commons License
see Wikia:Licensing.| In chronology, an epoch is an instant
chosen as the origin of a particular time scale. The epoch
serves as a reference point from which time is measured. Days,
hours and other time units are counted from the epoch, so that
the date and time of events can be specified. Events that took
place earlier can be dated by counting negatively from the
epoch. Epochs are generally chosen to be convenient or
significant by a consensus of the time scale's initial users.
Each calendar era starts from an arbitrary epoch, which is often
chosen to commemorate an important historical or mythological
event. Asian national eras Edit - The official Japanese system
numbers years from the accession of the current emperor,
regarding the calendar year during which t