In this article, we emphasize that counting years, by scholars or readers of texts whose objective is to critically and truthfully narrate-interpret history, is epistemologically essential to authentically understand and learn from such texts. The counting-reading (-awareness) of the years that certain history texts refer to, is a topic that has been overlooked by many well- known theoretical historians such as Hayden White, François Hartog, and Hans- George Gadamer. Therefore, our purpose is to emphasize an (obvious) epistemological process whose importance is overlooked and insufficiently analyzed. We argue that any text that attempts to truthfully narrate and interpret how the human past happened loses its "raison d'être" if its reader neither counts nor is aware of the years in which the narrated events take place; thus, to pragmatically refer to such concrete counting-reading of years we propose a neologism. Moreover, we "verify" and exemplify our propositions by analyzing some texts by the classic Mexican historian Justo Sierra Méndez. Finally, we briefly reflect through the comparative method on how counting the years of narrated historical processes can also be essential in the understanding of the so-called "historical" literature