title: BC dates in Python
body: <p>I'm setting out to build an app with Python that will need to handle BC dates extensively (store and retrieve in DB, do calculations). Most dates will be of various uncertainties, like "around 2000BC".</p>
  
  <p>I know Python's datetime library only handles dates from 1 AD.</p>
  
  <p>So far I only found <a href="https://github.com/okfn/datautil/blob/master/datautil/date.py">FlexiDate</a>. Are there any other options?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> The best approach would probably be to store them as strings (have String as the basic data type) and -as suggested- have a custom datetime class which can make some numerical sense of it. For the majority it looks like dates will only consist of a year. There are some interesting problems to solve like "early 500BC", "between 1600BC and 1500BC", "before 1800BC".</p>