In my first two articles posted on the Unz Review under the alias
“the first millennium revisionist”, I have argued that the basic structure of our standard historiography of Europe during the first millennium AD cannot be trusted, because it is built on a vast quantity of invented narratives and forged documents. In the subsequent two articles, I have suggested that the distortions have affected the basic chronology, which should be shortened by a number of centuries.
How many centuries? I must concede my failure to come to any firm conclusion. The search for a new chronological paradigm remains in the experimental stage. Gunnar Heinsohn (read
here and
here) has raised it to a scientific standard that will long remain an incentive for future researchers. His theory that the first millennium should be reduced to just three centuries, however, may no overcome all objections. In a nutshell, Heinsohn hypothesizes two major distortions in our textbook timeline, one resulting in an extension of roughly three centuries, the other inserting four centuries. My general impression, at this point, is that the first of these distortions is probable, while the other is only plausible. Let’s put it differently: Heinsohn theorizes that the events distributed in Western Roman Imperial Antiquity, Eastern Late Antiquity, and the Northern Early Middle Ages were in fact contemporary. The contemporaneity (or wide overlapping) of the first two time-blocks is, I suggest, more strongly supported than their contemporaneity with the latter.
Synchronizing Western Antiquity from the time of Augustus with Eastern Late Antiquity from the time of Diocletian does make a lot of sense. It explains, for one thing, why Constantinople appears less as an extension of Rome than as an independent resurgence of Hellenistic civilization, with a deeper love for Athens than for Rome. The striking cultural continuity between Hellenism and Byzantinism becomes explainable.
“Polish independent historian Artur Lalak has been saying for years that the only unaltered calendar is the Coptic calendar and currently according to this calendar the year is 1739. Our calendar was artificially extended by the 6th – 9th centuries and the evidence shows contradictions between various chronicles. Unfortunately, most of his works have not been translated into English.”
Lalak’s theory remains inaccessible to me, except for his belief in
cyclical great epidemics every 676 years (the next one in 2024, as he apparently predicted long before news of Covid 19). Regardless, I was thrilled and grateful to learn that, “Coptic years are counted from 284 AD” (
Wikipedia). Copts are Egyptian Christians who, like the Syrian Jacobites, adhere to the Monophysite Christology. Despite its condemnation at the Council of Chalcedon in 451,
Monophysitism remained strong even in Constantinople. Empress Theodora, Justinian’ wife (527-565), was a declared supporter of the Monophysite Church. Yet the discrimination they later endured from imperial orthodoxy led them to welcome the Muslim conquerors, under whom they were treated on an equal footing with the Orthodox Christians, known then as
Melkites (from the Semitic root for “king”, because they recognized themselves as subjects of the Byzantine
basileus, defender of orthodoxy).
How can we explain the Coptic Church’s use of a calendar shorter by 284 years than the Orthodox calendar? The standard explanation is that 284 AD is “the year Diocletian became Roman Emperor, whose reign was marked by tortures and mass executions of Christians, especially in Egypt” (
Wikipedia). This sounds like a cover-up of the original cause of the discrepancy. It is inconceivable that the ancient Church of Alexandria would count years from any other date than their own reckoning of the birth of Jesus. No matter how severe the
Diocletianic persecution was, it is highly improbable that it could gain a higher symbolic value than the year of God’s Incarnation, and the probability is even reduced if we take into account that its severity has been greatly exaggerated by ecclesiastical historians.
[1] Therefore, the Coptic calendar may be akin to a fossil: the tangible proof of an earlier stage of the Christian comput, before its lengthening by roughly 300 years at some indeterminate date.
By design, this falsification has obscured of the real history of the early Christian movement and its bitter sectarian conflicts. One of the main victims of the historiography written by the victors (the so-called “Great Church”) was Arianism, the religion of the Goths defeated by Justinian after one of the longest and bloodiest war of the first millennium. The mysteries now surrounding the Arian Goths is interwoven with the mysteries surrounding Constantine. By the admission of his biographer Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine died an Arian, baptized by the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia that he had installed as Patriarch of Constantinople. And if the Goths were Arians, it is because Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius II, was himself an Arian and had sent the Arian Ulfila to convert them. How can we reconcile this with the story of Constantine convening and presiding the Council of Nicaea, and forcing all bishops to sign the anti-Arian Nicene Creed, under threat of exile or worse? It makes little sense.
Equally confusing is the history of Gnosticism. The standard view is that the first Christian Gnostic was Marcion, a contemporary of Justin Martyr (100-165). Then came the Iranian Mani (c. 216-277). But Islamic sources, and particularly the biographer and bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm, who died in Baghdad in 995 or 998, places Mani before Marcion.
[2] So does the sixth-century Byzantine chronicler Malalas, placing Mani during the reign of Nerva Augustus after Domitian (“During his [Nerva Augustus’s] reign Manea appeared, preaching, teaching and attracting a mob,” X.54), and smearing Marcion as “a Manichaean” (XI,19). Scholars assume that “his [Malalas’s] account of Mani himself is misplaced (X §54, Bo268).”
[3] But that may not be the case. Manichaeism may have preceded Christianity in the Roman Empire. It may even have been its original matrix. Mani deemed himself “the apostle of Jesus Christ.” If you consider, in addition, that he was from a Jewish Baptist sect (the Elchasites), that he had a mother named Maryam and twelve disciples, and that his death was depicted as a crucifixion and commemorated by a sacred meal, much speculation is allowed.
[4]My only point here is that there are contradictions and weaknesses in the narrative of the first three centuries AD as elaborated by ecclesiastical historians, indicating a probable tampering with the chronology. Further research in Islamic and Byzantine chronicles may yield other discrepancies with standard Church history, and add credibility to the hypothesis that the Copts have preserved, even unknowingly today, a correct chronology that makes Jesus (and Augustus) roughly contemporary with Diocletian, as Heinsohn suggests.
Here I will add to the case the fascinating contribution of Swedish scientists Lars-Åke Larsson and Petra Ossowski Larsson, who, after a thorough analysis of the dendrochronological data, have concluded that Late Antiquity should be shortened by 232 years.
But first, a short discussion about modern scientific dating methods is in order.
Scientific Dating Methods
Any theory claiming that our chronology is faulty legitimately raises the objection of modern scientific methods of dating: do they not confirm the accepted chronology? One of these methods is actually quite old: comparing astronomical retrocalculations with historical records of cosmic events such as eclipses has been done for many centuries. Since the celestial bodies move like clockwork, they give us a precise measuring rod, which can, in theory, be applied to ancient chronicles.
There are indeed very ancient astronomical records, as astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. The Babylonians left astronomical observations on clay tablets, and were even able to make predictions about conjunctions and eclipses. Today, a computer program such as NASA Eclipse Explorers and Eclipse Search Engines, freely available on the
NASA Eclipse Web Site, makes possible a true astronomical projection of the real time line.
[5] So in theory, matching astronomical events recorded in chronicles with their real time should be easy. In practice, it is hardly the case. Richard Stephenson writes in
Historical Eclipses and Earth’s Rotation, regarding ancient Greek and Roman sources:
“Although numerous descriptions of both solar and lunar obscurations are preserved in these sources, commencing as early as the seventh century BC, most accounts are too vague to be suitable for investigating the Earth’s past rotation. The majority of writings which mention eclipses are literary rather than technical, and include historical works, biographies and even poems.”
[6]
As a result, astronomical records are only used to fine-tune the existing chronology. An eclipse recorded in a first-millennium-AD Latin text can be dated precisely if we already know the span of a few decades when to look for it. The best match will be adopted, and whatever inconsistency is found will be ascribed to the imprecision of the source. When no match is found, the source will be considered faulty. Let us take as an example Titus Livy, who in his History of Rome from Its Foundation, Book 37, reported the following astronomical event that had taken place many years earlier:
“When the consul [Publius Africanus] left for the war, during the games celebrated in honor of Apollo, on the fifth day before the ides of July, in a clear sky during the day, the light was dimmed since the Moon passed before the circle of the Sun.”
The best match that has been found in accordance with the time ascribed to Livy (59 BC-17 AD) is March 14, 190 BC. But, as Florin Diacu comments in
The Lost Millennium (recommended reading), that match is imperfect. “Fomenko, broadening the search by surveying all the eclipses from 600 BC to AD 1600, found only one that matched both the text’s description of the eclipse and its reference to July: AD July 10, 967.”
[7]The layman — like myself — has little means of checking who is right, so the only point I am making here is that correlating ancient chronicles with astronomical retrocalculations always implies reliance on a pre-existing chronology, that is, circular reasoning. As a matter of fact, it has never led to a significant revision of the standard chronology, except by mavericks like Fomenko.
Even more to the point, approximations and errors are common — the rule rather than the exception. For example, Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the father of our standard universal chronology, relied intensely on astronomy, but, as his contemporary critics already complained, he refused to take into account the phenomenon of “precession” (the slow wobbling of the Earth’s axis through the poles), believing that those who affirmed its existence, like Copernicus, were wrong. This affected his calculations, since the precession advances the calendar of by one day every seventy-one years.
[8]
German researchers
Uwe and Ilya Topper use astronomical records to challenge the consensual chronology. Believing that the earth’s axis has known several jerks in past centuries, they calculate that the period between the last two jerks (in Caesar’s time and in the fifteenth century) was not 1,400 years long, but only 700 years long. I have no confidence in their calculation, and only mention it to underscore that astronomy is a double-edged sword in the chronological controversy. (The Toppers, nevertheless, have some very interesting articles in English on their blog
www.ilya.it/chrono/en).
The unreliability of astronomy for confirming the existing chronology has been involuntarily demonstrated by astronomer Robert Russell Newton. In his book
The Moon’s Acceleration (1979), he surveyed astronomical events recorded in history, and concluded that the moon knew periods of unexplained acceleration. Anatoly Fomenko argues, quite reasonably, that he should have concluded instead that the events were wrongly dated. Conversely, the same Newton argued, in
The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (1977), that, “Ptolemy certainly fabricated many of the aspects of the lunar eclipses, and he may have fabricated all of them,”
[9] but here again, Fomenko and other chronology revisionists disagree: they believe instead that Ptolemy lived at a different time than commonly ascribed.
[10]The appearances of comets, which are among the most reported events in the annals, are a case in point that astronomy can be a challenge to conventional chronology. Unlike eclipses, their periodicity is either imprecise or unknown, and therefore cannot serve as a chronological marker. We can convince ourselves of this by reading on the site
cometography.com the contradictory opinions concerning the comet reported in February 1106, described in great detail in the
Chronica of Sigebert of Gembloux (1030-1112).
[11] On the other hand, the comets are rare enough to make a synchronization of their accounts possible. But such a method can be destabilizing. Gunnar Heinsohn, whose theory I have presented in
“How Long Was the First Millennium?” has used the famous Comet of Justinian in 536 as a marker for synchronizing Antiquity, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
What about modern, scientific methods of dating like radiocarbon and dendrochronology? Are they as reliable as their inventors pretend? Radiocarbon laboratories rarely make their calculations available for independent testing, and there have been so many cases of misdating that the early enthusiasm has now cooled down. As we can read in an
article from Cornell University, “new research shows that commonly accepted radiocarbon dating standards can miss the mark — calling into question historical timelines.”
[12] Besides its restriction to organic materials, and in addition to errors due to contamination — as one author said, “the radiocarbon date, that’s the date the last dog pee-ed on it” — the more fundamental problem comes from the false assumptions on which the whole method is based. The basic principle is that when an organism dies, it ceases exchanging carbon atoms with the surrounding, and its ratio between carbon 14 (14C or C14) and carbon 12 (12C or C12) decreases exponentially, so that it is possible to calculate the time passed since its death from the measure of that ratio. But that is based on the assumption that the C14/C12 ratio is perfectly constant in the atmosphere everywhere on Earth and throughout history. That assumption is most probably false, since C14 is formed from cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere, and cosmic conditions are affected by multiple factors.
[13] As Lars-Åke Larsson and Petra Ossowski Larsson explain:
“the14C/12C-ratio in the atmosphere turned out to be anything but stable.14C is generated in the upper atmosphere by cosmic radiation, which is highly variable. Moreover, “old” carbon from the oceans, tundras and from volcanoes is injected into the atmosphere at a changing rate, not to mention the burning of fossil fuels. Soon after this unpredictable behaviour had been understood, the necessity of a calibration procedure when converting measured “14C-ages” into true calendar ages was realized. For this calibration the radiocarbon content of many samples of known ages had to be measured.”
[14]
Because of its imprecision, radiocarbon dating is rarely used for the first millennium AD. As the British archaeologist Alex Bayliss wrote in 2009: “[radiocarbon] studies in the Roman period remain extremely rare as there is a perception that artifact-based dating is more precise (and less expensive!).”
[15] As regarding its use for dating more ancient artifacts, Peter James writes in
Centuries of Darkness, prefaced by Cambridge archaeology professor Colin Renfrew: “when a radiocarbon date agrees with the expectations of the excavator it appears in the main text of the site report; when it is slightly discrepant it is relegated to a footnote; if it seriously conflicts it is left out altogether.”
[16]This leaves us with dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. Each time period creates typical sequences of tree rings so that, by overlapping sequences of different trees from archaeologically dated wood samples, it is possible in theory to construct a standard sequence that reaches back centuries for a given region. Dendrochronology has proved very useful for dating Roman sites, since there are considerable amounts of well-replicated tree-ring sequences from construction oak wood of Roman origin from Germany, France and England. Ernst Hollstein, one of the earliest and most active dendrochronologists in Germany, produced in 1980 an absolute reference for oak going back from our time to 716 BC.
[17] In 1984, a joint venture by the dendro-labs in Belfast, Köln and Stuttgart Hohenheim, produced a continuous oak tree-ring chronology for Western Europe, which spanned more than 7000 years.
To come up with this impressive result, dendrochronologists use a big amount of math. Here is the list by Ernst Hollstein himself: “Transformation of the ring-width into logarithmic differences, preferential treatment of the correlating arithmetic, theoretical derivation of congruent patterns, distance regression of similarity, regional analysis, test function with scope of dating, statistics of sapwood and lost tree rings, distribution of centered differences between dating of art styles and dendrochronological dating.”
[18]Such a complicated method can be fine-tuned to reach the desired results without anyone noticing. Some historians have complained about a lack of transparency. There are also potential sources of errors, such as: “Some tree species tend to form false rings. For instance, in 1936 and 1937, a Texas yellow pine grew five rings because of early spring frosts.”
[19]What is even more important to understand it that tree-ring dating is relative by definition, because any tree-ring sequence is “floating” until someone decides where to fit it on the timeline. And the decision always rests on a preconceived idea. Any sample is first attributed an approximate place in time based on historical and archaeological information, then an acceptable match is searched for, which will circularly reinforce the original assumption. Moreover, the strength of dendrochronology depends on the amount of overlapping samples available for any given time: tree-rings are not barcodes, and only a great number of samples can give certainty against error. But since the dating of one sequence depends on the dating of other sequences, a weakness somewhere in the chain can totally invalidate the whole chain.
Such weakness has been identified by Lars-Åke Larsson and Petra Ossowski Larsson, Swedish scientists who have specialized in the analysis of dendrochronological data. As the inventors of
Cdendro, a program for dendrochronological crossdating and data quality tests, they developed a critical view of the way dendrochronological data are sometimes bent to fit preconceived ideas.
In 2010 they focused on one of the centerpieces of Ernst Hollstein’s oak-tree chronology: a single stem from the basement of the Roman amphitheater of Trier, built in the first century AD, that had been well preserved because the basement had remained filled with water for centuries. Based on the 227 rings identified in the stem, Ernst Hollstein dated its felling year as around AD 694. But Lars-Åke and Petra Larsson noticed that a sequence of 100 years in that stem “matches perfectly not only to AD 670 but
also to the Hollstein data 207 years earlier.” “The match implies, that when we are looking at data of the periods AD 236-336 and AD 443-543, then we are looking at data from the
same time!” This means that “207 invented years” have crept into Hollstein’s curve.
[20] The authors conclude: “all dendrochronological datings done on West Roman time wood is wrong by some unknown number of years!”
[21]In the following years, the Swedish couple refined they analysis and in February 2015 confirmed: “we see the growth pattern of Hollstein’s data for the period AD 203-336 being repeated 207 years later in the period AD 410-543.”
[22]The Larssons expanded their investigation by examining how professional dendrochonologists have tried to bridge the continental “Migration gap” by using Irish and Scandinavian data, but could not confirm their optimistic claims. They published their result in April 2015, under the title “Dendrochronological Dating of Roman Time”:
“we have found a distinct correlation between a long north-west European oak curve anchored archaeologically in Roman time, and the Scandinavian pine curves, but 218 years later than expected. There is no correlation at or near to the expected point of match. …
the match of the European Roman oak complex extended with Irish late BC collections against the absolute Scandinavian pine masters does not confirm the conventional dating. Instead there is a significant match 218 years later than expected.”
[23]
In February 2016, they published an additional article titled “Astronomical dating of Roman time,” in which they correlated their earlier findings with astronomical data (using the NASA website eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html), and concluded: “Our results indicate that the Christian era was inflated with 232 years already when it was invented. This was done by back-dating West-Roman and related history by means of astronomical retrocalculation after the western part of the Roman empire had declined.”
[24] They discovered, for example, that the precise descriptions of eclipses given by Pliny the Elder in chapters 10 and 32 of Book II of his
Natural History correspond only very approximately to the year 71 AD, to which they are traditionally ascribed, while they correspond perfectly to the year 303, that is, 232 years later.
In August 2016, Larsson & Larsson Ossowski published their longest and most synthetic article, titled “Redating West-Roman history,” in which they documented two sets of “twin events” separated by 232 years. These are “major incisive events which were dated or reported multiple times in different historical contexts so that it seems that they happened twice.”
These are events whose impact extends throughout the Mediterranean Basin, and whose Latin accounts in the Western Roman Empire and Greek accounts in the Eastern Roman Empire have been erroneously dated by modern historians 232 years apart, creating the illusion that they happened twice. From the point of view of the distance that separates us from the events in question, it is the Western date that is too old by 232 years.
[25]The first event is the natural disaster documented by ancient historians of the Eastern Roman Empire such as Procopius of Caesarea, Cassiodorus, or John of Ephesus. Procopius writes that in the tenth year of Justinian (536), “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year” (Book IV, chapter 14). This led to a plague from around 541 till the end of Justinian’s reign in 565: “During these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated” (Book II, chapter 22). Scientists have long suspected that the disease was the bubonic plague caused by the pathogen Yersinia pestis, and this was confirmed in 2013 by DNA analysis of samples collected from a graveyard in Aschheim, Germany.
According to Larsson & Ossowski Larsson, “The Justinian plague was such a traumatic event that it apparently resulted in multiple reports.” As it begins in 542, i.e. at the end of the Roman gap, they tested their hypothesis by looking for an echo of this catastrophic event in the Western context around the year 310, i.e. 542 minus 232. They found it in the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263-339), who wrote of an epidemic dated (by modern scholars) in the year AD 310 or 311, with symptoms consistent with the bubonic plague (Book IX, chapter 8):
“The usual winter rains and showers were denying the earth its normal downpour when famine struck, as well as plague and an epidemic of another sort of disease: an ulcer that was called a carbuncle because of its fiery appearance. It spread very dangerously over the entire body but attacked the eyes in particular, blinding countless men, women, and children … Countless numbers died in the cities and even more in the villages and countryside … Death, waging war with the two weapons of plague and famine, quickly devoured whole families, so that two or three bodies might be removed for burial in a single funeral procession.”
Larsson & Ossowski Larsson comment: “the description of two episodes of plague and famine in the written sources with 232 years in between is of course a ‘through ball’ for our hypothesis.”
If the two events are one and the same, then the intervening years may be invented. This is supported by the
Liber Pontificalis, a collection of biographies of the bishops of Rome from saint Peter up to the fifteenth century, edited by several authors at different times. Based on internal evidence, it is admitted that the earliest lives, up to Sylvester I (314-335) in Constantine’s days, were composed around 535-540. In
a recent article, Eivind Heldaas Seland argues that:
“The names and dates up to 354 seem to be derived from a chronicle of that year called the ‘Liberian Catalogue’ after Pope Liberius, who held the papacy from 352 to 366. Most of the other information contained in the biographies up to the period from which the author had personal experience or information, that is until the late 5th century onwards, is either impossible to confirm, apparently misinformed and in some cases even plainly invented.”
[26]
According to the Larssons’ hypothesis, both Eusebius and Procopius described the same pandemic because they are contemporaries.
Procopius reports for the year 539 the appearance of a comet “at first about as long as a tall man, but later much larger. And the end of it was toward the west and its beginning toward the east, and it followed behind the sun itself.” Although Eusebius does not mention a natural cosmic event triggering the famine and the plague in his Church History, he does include a supernatural cosmic event in his Life of Constantine, for the year 312 (= 539 − 227):
“He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.”
Eusebius and Procopius happen to come from the same city of Caesarea Palestinae. Eusebius was a Christian historian and theologian who was the bishop of Caesarea around 314 and became close to Constantine. Procopius was a secular historian and lawyer who was close to Justinian and his chief military commander Belisarius. Strangely, Procopius supposedly wrote some 160 years after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, yet he mentions Christianity only in passing remarks such as: “At the opening of spring, when the Christians were celebrating the feast which they call Easter …” (Book IV, chapter 14). Moreover, he consistently calls the capital of the empire Byzantion, although it had been refounded and renamed Constantinopolis 200 years earlier. The ensuing hypothesis is that Eusebius and Procopius are expressing different views on the same events, standing on the opposite sides of the widening gap between the old pagan world and the new Christian one.
Since Eusebius writes about the time of Constantine and Procopius writes about the time of Justinian, it follows logically that Constantine and Justinian are also contemporaries. The Larssons draw attention to
a mosaic in Hagia Sophia depicting the Virgin Mary with Child flanked to her left by Constantine offering his Nova Roma and to her right by Justinian offering his Hagia Sophia. The two emperors are clad identically, but appear of different ages: “while Constantine is depicted as a young man with brown hair and rosy cheeks, Justinian is an old man with grey hair and wrinkles.”
It is reported by Socrates Scholasticus of Constantinople (c. 380-439) that Constantine’s son Constantius built “a great church called Sophia” around 346. This church is said to have been destroyed by fire fifty years later, while the present building was inaugurated by Justinian in 537, then rededicated in 562. “Interesting with our hypothesis in mind,” write the authors, “is that 562, the date for the rededication of the present Hagia Sophia, would be the same year as RomAD 330, the year of the dedication of Constantinople by Constantine.”
Could Constantine and Justinian be one and the same person, building Constantinople and Hagia Sophia in the same lifetime? I find this suggestion by Larsson and Ossowski hard to sustain, since all Byzantine sources distinguish the two characters, and Procopius assumes that Constantine lived long before Justinian. Besides, I doubt that the author who goes by the name Eusebius of Caesarea is who he claims to be, and I suspect that his Life of Constantine is a fiction, perhaps roughly contemporary with the forged Donation of Constantine. In any case, it is reasonable to assume that Justinian did live two centuries after Constantine.
The Western dendrochronological data corrected by Larsson and Ossowski do not tell us when, in the Byzantine timeline, ghost centuries must be removed. Erasing the historical block between Constantine and Justinian is neither the only nor the best solution. Based on the considerations presented in my earlier articles, I am rather inclined to consider as non-existent the obscure period of Byzantium before Constantine (or, to be more precise, before Diocletian). This means that we can move forward Western Roman history by 232 years without touching Eastern Roman history. That puts the founding of Constantinople one century after Augustus, rather than three. The exaggerated timespan can be explained by Rome’s obsession to claim precedence over Constantinople. Shortening the gap between Western and Eastern history solves the mystery of the almost deserted state of Rome from the mid-third century, which supposes a Roman Empire without a capital for a whole century.
Shortening Late AntiquityThe second case of “twin events” that Larsson & Ossowski Larsson document in their groundbreaking article, “Redating West-Roman history” (2016), is the end of the city of Petra in Jordan, presumably after a major earthquake which crippled the city’s water managing system. Such an earthquake, which devastated the Roman cities of Palestine from Haifa in the north to Petra in the south, happened on the night between the 18 and 19 of May 363 in standard chronology (RomAD 363).
“Nabataean/Roman infrastructure was never rebuilt after the earthquake, it is thought that the post-363 inhabitants dwelt for more than two and a half centuries in a city affected by flash floods and with a primitive economy. Petra suddenly and mystically disappears from the sources after that period.”
However, archaeological evidence, including papyri found in Petra, shows that the city was still prosperous — and partly Christian — up to the second half of the sixth century. Based on these Petra papyri, but also on epigraphy and radiocarbon dating, the authors hypothesize a large earthquake in the southern part of the Dead Sea Fault around 595, exactly 232 years after the documented earthquake of 363. At that time, Petra had passed from West-Roman domination to Byzantine domination, but “With our hypothesis, Roman Petra and Byzantine Petra existed side by side, maybe in separated quarters, and were destroyed in the same earthquake in 595.”
In that case, “the time between RomAD 363 and 595 would collapse to nothing.” The Christian era counts 232 years too many between the beginning of the 5th century and the middle of the 7th century. This period coincides with the so-called “Migration period”. The authors make an interesting connection to the work of Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, who in
Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939) has developed an alternative theory about the collapse of the Western Roman Empire: the empire did not collapse at all in the 5th century, but in the 7th century, and not because of the Barbarian invasions, but because of the Arab-Muslim conquest of
Syria and North Africa, which destroyed the Roman unity of the Mediterranean world and brought a stop to the trade between East and West. Pirenne’s thesis has suffered the paradoxical fate of being largely corroborated yet ignored because it puts too much stress on the conventional narrative. Larsson & Ossowski Larsson’s revised chronology makes full sense of it: “According to our hypothesis, the crash of the West-Roman empire came with the start of the Arabian expansion after 630. This has been postulated by Henri Pirenne.”
Other unsolved mysteries in the early relationship between the Roman-Christian world and the Arab-Islamic world can begin to find a solution, as “the development of Christianity within the Roman Empire … becomes a much more dynamic process.” The authors write in “Astronomical dating of Roman time”:
“With the hypothesis that RomAD 412 in Alexandria is the same year as 644 in Constantinople, Arianism gets a quite dynamic development. It took only about one hundred years until Islam emerged possibly as the result of a theological controversy. The Christian church reacted with a sharp persecution of all kinds of heresy, and with a strict consolidation of the scriptures.”
[27]
What Larsson & Ossowski Larsson are really doing is reduce Late Antiquity, a period so elusive that it had gone unnoticed until Peter Brown drew attention to it in 1971.
[28] They believe this period of about 350 years has to be drastically reduced to just over one century of “clustered natural catastrophes.” As they write in the concluding section of their article “Redating West-Roman history”:
“while the mainstream historians count about 350 years during this period, we count just slightly more than 100 years which unarguably adds a dynamic touch to the ‘dark ages’. Because in the end it is the time frame given by the scientific consensus which allows the historians to spread the known historical events over the available time span. Do you dispose of 350 years, you will have to write history for 350 years. This means for example that in mainstream history the early Byzantine period always comes after the late Roman period, never parallel with it, which might be problematic as in the case of Petra. Byzantine Petra seems to exist for 232 more years among the ruins of Roman Petra.
The same is valid for the advance of Christianity in the Roman empire. Initiated under Constantine, the process seems still not finished under Justinian though Christianity has been the state church for almost 200 years. Prominent chroniclers contemporary with Justinian write in a ‘classic style’ which evokes the question if they are already Christians or still pagans. Pagan festivals are still observed in Constantinople as reported by Agathias.
… In our short version of Late Antiquity, Constantine and Justinian are at least contemporaries. Byzantine Petra is destroyed in the same earthquake as Roman Petra. Christianity is new to the Romans and there are a lot of people, especially the intellectuals like Procopius and Agathias, who still follow classic ideals. Byzantium is the name used for the capital city until the end of the reign of Justinian, after his death Constantinople is used instead. …
The cold period which is called the Late Antique Little Ice Age is in our version not only a part of Late Antiquity, it is
pari passu with Late Antiquity. This means that climatic coincidences most probably started the course of events which hundred years later led to the fall of the West-Roman empire and the transformation of the East-Roman empire, simultaneously and not after each other with 232 years in- between.”
[29]
The authors added new arguments to their theory in August 2019, in an article about the famous “coin collection” found in the grave of Childeric, an early Merovingian king believed to have reigned from 458-481 AD. His grave contained a large amount of old Roman denarii that had stopped being circulated around 240, more than two hundred years before Childeric’s death. Rather than being evidence of a dynastic heirloom (the dynasty had hardly begun), this treasure shows that Childeric was contemporary with Severus Alexander (AD 222 to 235).
“The period of instability which allowed Childeric to gain power in parts of Gaul thus was not the time after the fall of the West-Roman empire as conventionally assumed, but the Crisis of the Third Century. Childeric did not live more than hundred years after, but 60 years before Constantine the Great (whoever that was). Therefore his pagan style burial with a stunning sacrifice of 21 horses was fully acceptable also by Roman standards. His son Clovis was the first Merovingian king to become a Christian as narrated by Gregory of Tours (book II), in a manner very similar to the conversion of Constantine I as narrated by Eusebius. We will have to reconsider which of the stories is the original and which is the copy. / This also explains why there are no ‘western’ coins of the Tetrarchy and the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties (RomAD 284 to 392) in Childeric’s treasure. These dynasties would have reigned after 518, long after Childeric’s death.”
[30]
Charlemagne’s Ghost
Without surprise, the work of Lars-Åke Larsson & Petra Ossowski Larsson has been met with contempt within the dendro community. In a paper published in 2019 by the academic journal
Dendrochronologia under the title “Missing link in Late Antiquity?” Andreas Rzepecki and his co-authors acknowledge weak matches in the dendrochronological record for Roman times, but conclude that they must be correct anyway because “criticism of the general accepted medieval timeline has already been disproved by various scientific disciplines.”
[31]On their side, Lars-Åke Larsson & Petra Ossowski Larsson respectfully acknowledge the work of Heribert Illig and Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, who together with other German scholars have long argued that our conventional chronology of the first millennium AD is too long by some 300 years.
[32] Illig and Niemitz believe that the Carolingian Empire was a literary half-fiction born out of the propaganda needs of later Germanic emperors.
Although it may seem that the work of Lars-Åke Larsson et Petra Ossowski Larsson supports the theory of Illig and Niemitz, this is hardly the case. The time-blocks deleted do not overlap. For the Larssons, it has to be taken from Late Antiquity, from around 300 to 550, while for Illig and Niemitz, the phantom period belongs to the Early Middle Ages, roughly between 610 and 910. The Swedish couple is confident about this later period: “we can regard European tree-ring chronologies back to about 500 as a true projection of the real time line.”
[33]Yet in 2010 the same authors stated that the “Roman gap” is not the only weak point in the dendrochronology: “also the ‘Carolingian gap’ (or ‘Merovingian gap’) centred around AD 750 is problematic.”
[34] The great Ernst Hollstein himself mentioned the difficulty of this period:
“All attempts to get enough tree ring sequences from timber of the Carolingian times have failed … It is strange, but it proved as extremely difficult to connect the Merovingian wood samples from excavations with the above mentioned chronologies. … After two years of intensive studies I can name at last the right dates and put in order all samples of the early Middle Ages.”
[35]
The Larssons now concur that “Hollstein bridged the ‘Carolingian gap’ correctly!” But they add: “the closing of the Carolingian gap does not imply a proof against the theory of invented years during Carolingian time!”
[36]Is it possible that Illig-Niemitz and the Larssons are both right about, respectively, the “Migration gap” of Late Antiquity and the “Carolingian gap” of the Early Middle Ages? If so, our first-millennium chronology would have to be shortened by not just one period comprising 2 to 3 centuries, but by two such periods, just like
Gunnar Heinsohn suggested. More research is needed.
Notes
[1] Edward Gibbon was the first to call into question the authenticity of traditional accounts of the Christian martyrs in his
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).
[3] Elizabeth Jeffreys, Brian Croke, Roger Scott (eds.),
Studies in John Malalas, Brill, 2017 p. 13
[4] Read Werner Sundermann’s articles “Manicheism v. Missionary activity and technique” and “CHRISTIANITY v. Christ in Manicheism,” both from
Encyclopædia Iranica (2009) and available online at
www.iranicaonline.org [7] Florin Diacu,
The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables under Siege, second edition, John Hopkins University Press, 2011, p. 85. Chapter 2 of this book, pp. 33-52, is a good exposé of the use of astronomy in chronology.
[9] Robert R. Newton,
The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy, The John Hopkins UP, 1997, p. 374.
[16] Peter James,
Centuries of Darkness: a challenge to the conventional chronology of Old World archaeology, Rutgers UP, 1993, p. xix.
[19] Diacu,
The Lost Millennium, op. cit., p. 176.
[27] Ossowski Larsson and Larsson, “Astronomical dating of Roman time,”
op. cit. [29] Ossowski Larsson and Larsson, “Redating West-Roman history,”
op. cit. [33] Ossowski Larsson and Larsson, “Redating West-Roman history,”
op. cit. [34] Larsson and Ossowski Larsson, “Merging Hollstein curves,”
op; cit. [35] Ernst Hollstein, “Dendrochronologische Untersuchungen an Hölzern des frühen Mittelalters,” in
Acta Praehistorica 1(1970), p. 147-156 [p. 148], quoted in Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, “Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?”
op. cit.
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