Niemitz - 300 Phantom Years of the Middle Ages

[InvisibleBallots]

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf

Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?

Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz
Klopstockstr. 18, D-10557 Berlin, Germany
[e-mail]
(First version 1995-10-02, second version 1997-10-09, minor revision 2000-04-03)

Did the early Middle Ages really exist?

This question in itself – and more so the answer ‘NO, the early Middle Ages did not exist’ – is surprising, to say the least. It contradicts all basic knowledge and attacks the historian’s self respect to such an extreme that the reader of this paper is asked to be patient, benevolent and open to radically new ideas. I shall argue step by step – and, I hope, you will follow. With a group of friends (Müller 1992; Illig 1991; Niemitz 1991; Zeller 1991; Marx 1993; Topper 1994) I have been doing research on this subject since 1990. This is the reason for using ‘we’ or ‘I’ intermittently. The thesis mainly says, with far-reaching implications and consequences:

Between Antiquity (1 AD) and the Renaissance (1500 AD) historians count approximately 300 years too many in their chronology. In other words: the Roman emperor Augustus really lived 1700 years ago instead of the conventionally assumed 2000 years.

However, the whole well-known historiography of the Middle Ages contradicts this assertion! The easiest way to understand doubts about the accepted chronology and ‘well-known’ history is to seriously systematize the problems of medieval research. This will lead us to detect a pattern which proves my thesis and gives reason to assume that a phantom period of approximately 300 years has been inserted between 600 AD to 900 AD, either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents or by deliberate falsification (Illig 1991). This period and all events that are supposed to have happened therein never existed. Buildings and artifacts ascribed to this period really belong to other periods.

[JDPriestly]

1. Interesting

Strange idea. What do you think of this research? I don't know enough about medieval history to have an opinion.

[InvisibleBallots]

2. I think it's fascinating

Check out the chronology work done by Isaac Newton, Nosovski, AT Fomenko, and Gary Kasporov. The short version goes something like this: our basic idea of world historical chronology, ie, Ancient Greece is from 500BC, the Romans empire was established in 100BC, Egypt goes back x thousands of years, etc., is based on the work of two medival "historians" Scaliger and Petravius. No one has really done much correction of their work, and all the secondary and tertiary sources of history don't question their chronology. If you read their works, their methods were hardly scientific, they used numerology and astrology to come up with their timeline.

Newton and other scientists of his day believed that the "re-discovery" of "ancient Greece and Rome" during the Renassance were mostly forgeries and mythology made up in the middle ages, for various monetary and political reasons. Newton's work "The Origin of Monarchies" which is just now being published and released asserted this idea that 300 years were mistakenly added into the chronology. Some Russian and German mathmeticians are going much further, suggesting that perhaps up to 800 or so years of middle ages history is probably mythological, which would push dates for many things in history quite a bit forward.

The reaction by historians is hostile - in my opinion, they are acting like their religious beliefs are being questioned. At few historicans have made some noise about debunking these "nonsensical" theories, but so far, they are keeping awfully quiet about it. They will immediately point to C14 dating, but that doesn't prove their assertions, considering that c14 studies are "corrected" to fit into the accepted chronology. These theories have moved from Russian universities to Germany and Canada now. I expect to see a Discovery channel documentary any day now.

I do NOT defend all of the various sub-theories on this site, but this makes for a good introduction to the work being done on correcting our accepted chronology:

http://www.revisedhistory.org

Was Dante a historical character, or a political myth?

http://www.revisedhistory.org/dante.htm

[semillama]

4. C14 studies are NOT corrected to fit historic chronology

That's false. C14 dates are corrected, or more accurately, calibrated, to conform with tree ring chronologies, which are well-established back to about 11,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere. The amount of C14 in a sample is compared to the proportion of C14 in tree ring samples and that gives you the calibrated age. Uncalibrated C14 is basically just a measurement of the decay rate of your sample, while calibration compares the sample to a known.

check out http://www.rlaha.ox.ac.uk/orau/calibration.html for more information.

[On the Road]

9. Thanks for the Website

There are some interesting discussion threads. A few lunatics, but also threads like this one:

Coptic Calendar Suggests 300 Years Discrepancy?

I am quite interested by the idea that our current calendar has about 300 too many years in its era (AD). Has anyone considered the Coptic calendar of Martyrs which seems to suggest the 300 year error. It is suggested that this calendar began its era on 284 AD (http://pharos.bu.edu/) but this seems unlikely. First, I can not find any direct evidence of this. Does anyone know if it exists. Second, there is likely much evidence that could be found in the form of formal communication between the Roman Catholic church and the Coptic Church which should disclose when the discrepancy, if any, occured.

---snip, snip, snip


http://www.revisedhistory.org/forum/showthread.aspx?m=44993

[InvisibleBallots]

3. check out this map from 1628

I see Constantinople, I see Belgrade, I see Paris - where's Rome? Wasn't Rome the center of Europe in 1628? Wasn't that the seat of the Pope, and capital of Christandom?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Uhhhhhh, you're saying that Rome didn't exist in 1628?

That's just whack. There are too many independent confirmations, not to mention all those Roman and Etruscan ruins.

Those websites remind me of a parody website I saw a few years ago, in which somebody used photographs to "prove" that World War II never occurred. "Do you think these G.I.s would be playing cards if they were so near a war zone?" etc.

It dawned on me that he was satirizing Holocaust deniers by using their own methodology to "debunk" an event whose truth was not in doubt. I wrote him a note congratulating him on his cleverness, and he wrote back, "But look at the comment section." Sure enough, about half the comments were from people who thought the website was serious.

[struggle4progress]

5. Eine kranke. eom

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Explains why my broadband keeps cracking up...

...it hasn't been invented yet.
:silly:

[On the Road]

8. Wow -- That's Fascinating

I don't necessarily accept the argument, but I love to read stuff like this and try to keep an open mind. Regardless of whether the theory is correct, it's very educational in understanding how academic disciplines work and how they can go wrong sometimes.

The key to disproving the theory would be to find continuous records of any kind -- political, economic, religious -- for the period 500-1000 AD. Not that easy.

I would think the Catholic Church would be one of the best sources. There are certainly unbroken lists of popes. I would imagine there would be a wealth of subsidiary material that would be hard to fake: papal or government records, records from Catholic officials outside of Rome, etc. Some town governments in France, England, and other countries have records go back many centuries. Not clear if any would predate 1000 AD.

The more detail that exists, the more difficult it is to believe that three hundred years have been added. But all those dead centuries do seem a little strange.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. There are several reasons for accepting the existing chronology

The starting point for their thesis of 300 missing years is the Gregorian calendar correction. They try to make a mystery of why the calendar correction is right for days gained since 325 AD, not when Julius Caesar itroduced the Julian calendar. The reason for that is simple - the correction was to get the date of the vernal equinox back to March 21st, as specified in the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. This was important to the Council, and Gregory, because it's used to calculate the date of Easter. Here is the proclamation from Gregory explaining this.

Solar and lunar eclipses have been calculated throughout the period. They match with the manuscripts that record them, before the 'missing 300 year period'. Solar eclipses are rare enough at any one point on a planet that you couldn't get all these matches unless there was a basic agreement between the history and the astronomy.

Britain can offer two historical records that I know of from the period: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Church, written in the first half of the 8th century (and with 3 copies from that century in existence, in St. Petersburg, the British Library, and Cambridge University); and The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, of which several copies exist, of various dates (first compiled in 891, the copies were then updated as further events occurred). These documents talk about the popes that rules at various times.

If there was a conspiracy, it would have had to calculate accurate eclipse dates, forge the antique literature to reflect this, and span the records of the whole of Europe.

[pmbryant]

11. That settles that

Thanks for conclusively debunking this.

--Peter

[On the Road]

12. Ah Yes, I Expect That's Probably the Nail in the Coffin

I didn't think about eclipse dates. And while "the Venerable Bede" rings a bell, I didn't remember the century or the material.

It would astonish me if this theory were true. But it's a fascinating and instructive thought experiment to go back and show why it could not be true.

In fact, there's another "missing century" theory that I want to start a post on. On Egyptian history.

[trotsky]

14. And take a look at the original poster's profile.

Tombstone city. Ha, figures.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. No loss to DU

Whether they were a freeper troll, or just a plain nutcase with an obsession that history is one huge conspiracy (they tried to prove that everything from the Mithraic religion to Dante as fictional), they were a waste of space.

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. My first thought on seeing this was

collapsing 300 years of relatively recent history out of the record makes it easier to support the notion that the world was created only 6000 years ago.

What's the agenda of the person who came up with this nonsense?

On Further Edit --

600 to 900 AD was the time of the birth and expansion of Islam. So it didn't really happen? It was also the beginning of the Norse expansion, the christinization of the Norse lands. So York was never founded? Paris was never sacked by Vikings?

Those were the Dark Ages because of the breakdown of civilization IN SOUTHERN EUROPE. Things kept happening elsewhere. Charlemagne did not just pop us 30 years after the fall of Rome.