“Despite the best efforts of generations of distinguished Arabists, the history of the Arabs before Islam remains exasperatingly obscure,” wrote Harvard scholar Barry Hoberman, managing editor of Biblical Archeology.[1] The early history of Islam is in an even worst condition: a “revisionist school of Islamic Studies” is now shattering the canonical chronology, while other maverick scholars call Islamic geography an Abbasid “cover-up”. Yet new difficulties are being raised in the process. The main purpose of this article is to introduce Gunnar Heinsohn’s perspective into the debate, with my own personal input. I have presented Heinsohn’s “stratigraphically corrected” (SC) chronology of the first millennium in a previous Unz Review article titled “How Long Was the First Millennium?” Here is a brief summary. According to Heinsohn, the standard view of the first millennium C.E. is an arbitrary construct that doesn’t stand up to modern scientific archeological evidence. It is too long by some 700 phantom years. In reality, the period from the first Roman Emperor Augustus to the traditional Anno Domini 1000 lasted only about 300 years. The Crisis of the Third Century, beginning at the end of the Severan Dynasty in the 230s, coincides with the Tenth-Century Collapse starting in the 930s. The distortion resulted from an accumulation of errors and forgeries from the post-collapse centuries, when the reckoning in Anno Domini became commonly used in manuscripts. It was normalized in the 16th and 17th centuries by scholars such as Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) or Denys Pétau (1583-1652), and then internationalized by Jesuits missionaries, starting with their takeover of Chinese scholarship. [2]As a result of stretching 230 years into 930 years, simultaneous events happening in different parts of the world were artificially sequenced, leading ultimately to the modern division of the first millennium in three major time-blocks that need to be resynchronized: Imperial Antiquity (c. 1-230s), Late Antiquity (c. 300-640) and Early Middle Ages (c. 700-930). This explains why textbook history is distributed unevenly, most of the known events attributed to each time-block being localized in one of three geographical zones: for Imperial Antiquity, we know a lot about the Roman South-West, but little about the rest of Europe; for Late Antiquity, we know a lot about the Byzantine South-East, but little about Rome and Western Europe; and for the Early Middle Ages, we know a lot about the Germanic-Slavic North, but little about Rome or Constantinople. Because they are captive to an erroneous chronology, archeologists digging for first-millennium artifacts date their finds differently depending on the locations, even when these finds are at the same stratigraphic depth and exhibit the same technological advancement. To explain the resemblances of excavated materials supposedly separated by 300 or 700 years, they resort to theories of “revival”, “imitation”, spolia (recycled material), or—in utter desperation—“art collections”. Typically, for example, Charlemagne is said to have built in 2nd-century Roman style with materials recycled from the 2nd century. He is also supposed to have revived the classical Latin of Imperial Antiquity (1st-3rd century), down to calligraphic style. [3]The contemporaneity of Imperial Antiquity and Late Antiquity means that the start of Imperial Rome and the foundation of Constantinople are roughly contemporary; “a geographical sequence from west to east was turned into a chronological sequence from earlier to later.” [4] However, Byzantine Late Antiquity cannot be simply superimposed on Roman Imperial Antiquity, because it is itself some 120 years too long, according to Heinsohn. The Byzantine segment from the rise of Justinian (527) to the death of Heraclius (641) was in reality shorter and overlaps with the period of Anastasius (491-518). “We know that stratigraphies dated to Late Antiquity (Dyrrachium, Alexandria etc.) lack about 120 years of archaeological substance. Thus, the conventional Late Antiquity period from the 290s to 640s AD has not 350, but only some 230 years with residential strata.” [5]The contemporaneity of Imperial Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages means that the peoples living North of the Danube and East of the Rhine did not suddenly emerge from their forest-dwelling primitivism 700 years after the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Saxons, for example, competed with the Romans for the conquest of Great Britain from the early Imperial era. Thus the semi-legendary Arthur of Camelot, first mentioned as dux bellorum in the Historia Brittonum (dated 829) can be reunited with his alter-ego, Aththe of Camulodunum, the Celtic military leader in the period of Augustus. [6] However, here again, the correspondence is not a straight one, because the Carolingian Empire, traditionally placed in 800-841, must be shifted to the 890s-930s (corresponding to the 190s-230s in Imperial Antiquity). “Charlemagne and Louis [the Pious] do not belong to the 8th/9th century, but to the 9th/10th century.” [7] This is consistent with the appearance of Charlemagne in the Chansons de Geste in the late 11th century. One source of confusion is the multiplication of one Charles into many: Carolus Magnus is in fact identical to Carolus Simplex (898-929) and with other Charles in between. [8] “Stratigraphically . . . these Frankish rulers belonged to the 890s to 930s CE. Their phase of the Early Middle Ages ran parallel with the Severan period (190s-230s) of Imperial Antiquity as well as with the decades of the Justinian Dynasty in Late Antiquity.” [9]
Heinsohn’s theory, elaborated in dozens of long web-articles, is a work in progress that still leaves many unanswered questions, but it solves a few crucial problems. I have introduced some of these problems in two articles prior to “How Long Was the First Millennium?” In “How Fake is Roman Antiquity?” I started from Polydor Hochart’s critic of the common idea that Christian monks piously copied, throughout the Middle Ages, the Pagan literature of Roman Antiquity that Florentine humanists later discovered in the attics of European monasteries. From the incongruity of such a notion, Hochart concluded that most of this Roman literature was late medieval or Renaissance forgeries. But Heinsohn’s shortened chronology provides us with a better solution: the 11th century, when most of these texts were last copied, followed closely Imperial Antiquity (=Early Middle Ages), when they were first composed. The seven centuries that our Benedictine monks are supposed to have spent copying them again and again, in defiance to their sacred duty to burn them or scratch them clean, never existed. In my second article, “How fake is Church history?”, I argued that the standard history of the Roman Catholic Church amounts to a totally counterfeit autobiography, partly motivated by Rome’s rivalry with Constantinople. It is impossible to reconstruct the real history of the Church before the 11th century from the literary sources that were fabricated or adulterated in ecclesiastical scriptoriums. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill wrote about St Benedict’s life: “with no supporting evidence, narrative of this kind could contain almost no historical truth. We can take it on trust or not, as we feel inclined. Scholars have been generally disposed to accept it.” [10] The same can be said of more central figures like Constantine the Great, whose life and religious policies are known almost exclusively from Eusebius, whose authorship is extremely controversial. The reason why scholars tend to take Eusebius’s account at face value is that, without it, they simply could not write anything about Constantine. [11]Arguably Church history is biased to the point of inversion. For instance, a strong argument was made a long time ago by Walter Bauer that, contrary to the story propagated by the victorious Church, orthodoxy was preceded, not followed, by the great heresies. [12] As a result of the Catholic Church’s falsification of its own history, its emergence as the ghost of the Roman Empire, with the pope taking over most of the prerogatives of the emperor—not just the title of pontifex maximus, but also imperial properties, public treasury, and even military affairs—remains largely obscure to historians. [13] Interesting insights are provided by nonconformist scholars such as Joseph Atwill[14] or Francesco Carotta, the latter theorizing a probable diversion of the cult of Caesar. [15]In Heinsohn’s stratigraphically corrected (SC) chronology, the transition happened in the 11th century, during the Gregorian Reform, the “First European Revolution” as Robert I. Moore calls it. [16] This is only one century, not eight centuries, after the end of the Severan dynasty. This explains many strange anachronisms in ecclesiastical history, such as the formal adoption of the Nicene Creed in 1014, seven centuries after the Council that produced it (325), or the standardization in the 13th century of the Latin versio vulgate of the Bible commissioned to saint Jerome by Pope Damasus I (366-384). This also explains why Christian architecture and decorative styles of the 11th and 12th century are hard to distinguish from those of the 4th century, prompting scholars to speak of “a Paleo-Christian revival in Rome at the beginning of the 12th century.” [17]To understand the conversion of Rome to the cult of a Galilean Messiah, the background of the Severan emperors is an important clue. The founder of the dynasty, Septimius Severus, had married in Syria the daughter of a priest of the god Elagabal worshipped in Emesa (today’s Homs in Syria). His wife Julia Domna played an active role in the empire, especially when their son, Caracalla, became emperor in 211 at 13 years of age. After her death, her younger sister Julia Maesa was sent back to Phoenicia, from where she plotted to place upon the throne her grandson Elagabalus, who had served since his early youth as head priest of Elagabal. The Syrian domination was continued by the thirteen-year reign of Alexander Severus, with whom the dynasty came to an end in 235. This period is covered by the historian Herodian of Syria, probably a member of Julia Domna’s Eastern-oriented literary coterie—like Philostratus who wrote for her the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Herodian’s information on the god Elagabal (Latinization of the Arabic Ilah Al-Gabal, “God of the Mountain”) is quite interesting: A huge temple was erected to this god, lavishly decorated with gold, silver, and costly gems. Not only is this god worshipped by the natives, but all the neighboring rulers and kings send generous and expensive gifts to him each year. No statue made by man in the likeness of the god stands in this temple, as in Greek and Roman temples. The temple does, however, contain a huge black stone with a pointed end and round base in the shape of a cone. The Phoenicians solemnly maintain that this stone came down from Zeus. (Book 5, chapter 3)
A black stone worshipped in Syria in the 3rd century provides an appropriate transition for the main subject of this article: Gunnar Heinsohn’s solution to the problems facing historians of Arabia and Islam.
Muhammad and Meccan clan elders lifting the Black Stone into place (13th century)
Heinsohn on Arabia and IslamIn Heinsohn’s SC chronology, the rise of Christianity in the first three centuries AD and the rise of Islam from the 7th to the 10th century are roughly contemporary. Their six-century chasm is a fiction resulting from the fact that the rise of Christianity is dated in Imperial Antiquity while the rise of Islam is dated in the Early Middle Ages, two time-blocks that are in reality contemporary. The resynchronizing of Imperial Antiquity and Early Middle Ages provides a solution to some troublesome archeological anomalies. One of them concerns the Nabataeans. During Imperial Antiquity, the Nabataean Arabs dominated long distance trade. Their city of Petra was a major center of trade for silk, spice and other goods on the caravan routes that linked China, India and southern Arabia with Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome . In 106 AD, the Nabataean Kingdom was officially annexed to the Roman Empire by Trajan (whose father had been governor of Syria) and became the province of Arabia Petraea. Hadrian visited Petra around 130 AD and gave it the name of Hadriane Petra Metropolis, imprinted on his coins. Petra reached its urban flowering in the Severan period (190s-230s AD). [18]And yet, incredibly, these Arab long-distance merchants “are supposed to have forgotten the issuing of coins and the art of writing (Aramaic) after the 1st century AD and only learned it again in the 7th/8th century AD (Umayyad Muslims).” [19] It is assumed that Arabs fell out of civilization after Hadrian, and only emerged back into it under Islam, with an incomprehensible scientific advancement. The extreme primitivism in which pre-Islamic Arabs are supposed to have wallowed, with no writing and no money of they own, “stands in stark contrast to the Islamic Arabs who thrive from the 8th century, [whose] coins are not only found in Poland but from Norway all the way to India and beyond at a time when the rest of the known world was trying to crawl out of the darkness of the Early Middle Ages.” [20] Moreover, Arab coins dated to the 8th and 9th centuries are found in the same layers as imperial Roman coins. “The coin finds of Raqqa, for example, which stratigraphically belong to the Early Middle Ages (8th-10th century), also contain imperial Roman coins from Imperial Antiquity (1st-3rd century) and Late Antiquity (4th-7th century).” [21] “Thus, we have an impressive trove of post-7th c. Arab coins lumped together with pre-7th c. Roman coins of pre-7th c. Roman times. But we have no pre-7th c. Arab coins from the centuries of their close alliance with Rome in the pre-7th c. periods.” [22]The first Islamic Umayyad coins, issued in Jerusalem, “continue supposedly 700 years earlier Nabataean coins.” [23] Often displaying Jewish menorahs with Arabic lettering, they differ very little from Jewish coins dated seven centuries earlier; we are dealing here with an evolution “requiring only years or decades, but not seven centuries.” [24]
Architecture raises similar problems. Archeologists have no way of distinguishing Roman and Byzantium buildings from Umayyad buildings, because “8th-10th Cent. Umayyads built in 2nd Cent. technology” and followed Roman models. [25] “How could the Umayyads in the 8th c. AD perfectly imitate late Hellenistic styles,” Heinsohn asks, “when there were no specialists left to teach them such sophisticated skills?” [26]Moreover, “Umayyad structures were built right on top of Late-Hellenistic structures of the 1st c. BCE/CE.” [27] One example is “the second most famous Umayyad building, their mosque in Damascus. The octagonal structure of the so-called Dome of the Treasury stands on perfect Roman columns of the 1st/2nd century. They are supposed to be spolia, but . . . there are no known razed buildings from which they could have been taken. Even more puzzling are the enormous monolithic columns inside the building from the 8th/9th c. AD, which also belong to the 1st/2nd century. No one knows the massive structure that would have had to be demolished to obtain them.” [28]Far from rejecting the Umayyads’ servile “imitation” of Roman Antiquity, their Abbasid enemies resumed it: “8th-10th c. Abbasids bewilder historians for copying, right down to the chemical fingerprint, Roman glass.” Heinsohn quotes from The David Collection: Islamic Art / Glass, 2014: The millefiori technique, which takes its name from the Italian word meaning “thousand flowers”, reached a culmination in the Roman period. . . . The technique seems to have been rediscovered by Islamic glassmakers in the 9th century, since examples of millefiori glass, including tiles, have been excavated in the Abbasid capital of Samarra. [29]
I included in “How Long Was the First Millennium?” one of Heinsohn’s illustrations of identical millefiori glass bowls ascribed respectively to the 1st-2nd century Romans and to the 8th-9th century Abbasids. Here is another puzzling comparison: [30]
Heinsohn concludes that, “the culture of the Umayyads is as Roman as the culture of early medieval Franks. Their 9th/10th century architecture is a direct continuation of the 2nd c. AD. The 700 years in between do not exist in reality.” [31] “The Arabs did not walk in ignorance without coinage and writing for some 700 years. Those 700 years represent phantom centuries. Thus, it is not true that Arabs were backward in comparison with their immediate Roman and Greek neighbours who, interestingly enough, are not on record for having ever claimed any Arab backwardness. . . . the caliphs now dated from the 690s to the 930s are actually the caliphs of the period from Augustus to the 230s.” [32]This explains why archeologists often find themselves puzzled by the stratigraphy. For example, Haaretz reported that during a dig in Tiberias, archaeologist Moshe Hartal “noticed a mysterious phenomenon: Alongside a layer of earth from the time of the Umayyad era (638-750), and at the same depth, the archaeologists found a layer of earth from the Ancient Roman era (37 B.C.E.-132). ‘I encountered a situation for which I had no explanation — two layers of earth from hundreds of years apart lying side by side,’ says Hartal. ‘I was simply dumbfounded.’” [33]Heinsohn argues that the Umayyads of the Early Middle Ages are not only identical with the Nabataeans of Imperial Antiquity, but are also documented in the intermediate time-block of Late Antiquity under the name of the Ghassanids. “Nabataeans and Umayyads not only shared the same art, the same metropolis Damascus, and the same stratigraphy, but also a common territory that was home to yet another famous Arab ethnicity that also held Damascus: the Ghassanids. They served as Christian allies of the Byzantines during Late Antiquity (3rd/4th to 6th c. AD). Yet, they were already active during Imperial Antiquity (1st to 3rd c. AD). Diodorus Siculus (90-30 BC) knew them as Gasandoi, Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) as Casani, and Claudius Ptolemy (100-170 AD) as Kassanitai.” [34] In the Byzantine period, the Ghassanid caliphs had “the same reputation for anti-trinitarian monotheism as the Abbasid Caliphs now dated to 8th /9th centuries.” [35] They also, like the Islamic Arabs, preserved some Bedouin customs such as polygamy. [36]
The Revisionist School in Islamic StudiesIt is today admitted by many Western scholars that Islamic scriptures, including the Quran, are of a later date than claimed by the canonical account. It was under the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) that practically all traditional texts about Islam’s beginnings were written, mostly after the 9th century and mostly outside Arabia, notably in Iraq. As the victorious party in the conflict with the Umayyads, the Abbasids had great interest in legitimizing their rule, and took sweeping measures to destroy sources that contradicted their narrative. It was under the Abbasids that the Quran reached its final stage, and that copies reflecting earlier stages were forever lost. Another well-known aspect of early Islam is its Jewish background, best illustrated by the 135 mentions of Abraham (Ibrahim) in the Quran, just before Joseph, David, Jonah and Solomon. Entire surahs (Quranic chapters) are devoted to biblical legends. “Islam developed against the background of an Arabia strongly under the influence of Judaism,” states Gordon Newby in his respected History of the Jews of Arabia (1988). [37]Christian influence on the formation of Islam is also self-evident. Besides the many Quranic references to Jesus, Muhammad’s canonical biography mentions Jewish Christians known as “Nazarenes” or “Nazoreans”, believers in Christ who remained faithful to Moses’ Torah. Living mainly in Syria and speaking Aramean dialects, they were opposed to Trinitarian Christology and regarded the deification of Christ as a pagan deviance. Günter Lüling has argued that “considerable parts of the Koran text itself were pre-Islamic Christian strophic hymns,” and that the Meccan adversaries of Muhammad, the “ mushrikun” (“associators”), were not polytheist pagans, as previously assumed, but Trinitarian Christians. [38]John Wansbrough’s research into the early Islamic manuscripts, including analysis of the repeated use of Judeo-Christian monotheistic imagery in the Quran, led him to the conclusion that Islam was born out of a mutation in what was originally a Judeo-Christian sect that spread to Arab territories but looked back toward Jerusalem. In 1977, Wansbrough’s student Patricia Crone wrote with Michael Cook a book titled Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, which traces the origin of Islam in an attempt by Jewish exiles to recover Jerusalem from which they had been expelled in the 70s, and assigning to the Ishmaelites a share in God’s promise to Abraham. [39]From this perspective, the seven-century hiatus between the two episodes is quite extraordinary. Heinsohn’s shortened chronology restores the continuity. According to him, messianic Jews who were ousted by Titus from Jerusalem did not wait for 30 generations in a state of coma, before suddenly waking up with renewed fervor and plans for the reconquest of their lost city. Linguistic and philology concur. In 2000, a Syriac scholar using the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg published The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, showing that the Quran emerged in a region linguistically Syro-Aramaic rather than Arabic. And according to Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, about twenty percent of the 6000 Quranic verses are originally written in Aramaic from the 1st/2nd century AD. [40] So on the one hand, recent scholarship has pushed the final redaction of the Quran forward into the 9th century, while on the other hand, the Quran is shown to be rooted in Syriac literature and liturgy of the 1st and 2nd century. That conundrum finds a solution in Heinsohn’s SC chronology, which shifts forward the 2nd century of standard chronology immediately before the 9th century. What later turned into the new religion of Islam appears to have been originally a messianic movement to reclaim Jerusalem, not seven centuries after the expulsion of the Jews by the Romans, but merely decades later. As mentioned above, linguistic considerations points to a Syriac (Aramaic) rather than Arabic origin of the Quran. This in itself poses a challenge to the traditional geography of Islam. But there are other reasons for questioning the origin of Islam in the Hejaz. The identification of “Bakkah”, the home of Muhammad’s Quraych tribe according to the Quran, with the site of “Mecca” in Saudi Arabia (the two names are extremely close in Arabic writing) doesn’t really add up. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), Patricia Crone showed that what is known today as Mecca was neither an important trading center nor a pilgrimage destination at the time of Muhammad, and that its barren condition does not match at all the Quranic description of Bakkah as a fertile city with fields, grass and even gardens. Moreover, Mecca never had city walls, while Bakkah is described as a fortified city. In 2011, a book by Dan Gibson titled Qur’ānic Geography expounded the groundbreaking theory that the powerful Nabataean capital of Petra fits the Quranic description of Bakkah, as well as many stories in early Islamic history, while Mecca doesn’t. [41] In 2017, Gibson added to his argument with Early Islamic Qiblas, where he shows that the Qibla (direction of prayer) in Umayyad mosques was Petra, not Mecca. The Qibla was changed during the second Islamic civil war by Abd Allah Ibn al-Zubayr, leader of a dissident caliphate that took refuge in Mecca in 683. It was Al-Zubayr who moved the Black Stone from Petra and built for it a new Kaaba in Mecca. For a century after that, Islam was split between Umayyad traditionalists who continued to build their mosques facing Petra, and the Abbasid reformers who built their mosques facing Mecca. However, after the earthquake that devastated Petra’s water systems in 713, Petra was abandoned and slowly faded from memory. When the Abbasids supplanted the Umayyads in the East in 750, Petra and Mecca were merged in canonical historiography, and an Arabian location was determined for other Quranic locations such as Yathrib (Medina) and Khaybar, where Muhammad dealt with Jewish communities. Gibson’s arguments are presented in the documentary film directed by David Taylor, “The Sacred City: Discovering the Real Birthplace of Islam” (2016). Gibson’s theory is fully compatible with the Jewish root of Islam highlighted by the revisionist school of Islamic Studies, because Jews are easier to find in the region of Petra than in the Hejaz. The Nabataeans had been allies of the Maccabees during their struggle against the Seleucid monarchs. But there were internal divisions among them, just like among the Judeans. And the Nabataean kings’ later rivalry with the Hasmonean dynasty became a factor in the disorders that prompted Pompey’s intervention. A Roman army besieged Petra, after which the Nabataean king Aretas III paid a tribute, receiving in exchange formal recognition by the Roman Republic. Although Petra became a Hellenized Roman city, it certainly also harbored anti-Roman Arabs and a Jewish community simmering with messianic expectations. Gibson’s geographical revisionism also dovetails with Heinsohn’s chronological revisionism, since both identify the Arabs who took over Jerusalem in the 8th-9th centuries with the rulers of Petra and Damascus. According to Heinsohn, the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in Imperial Antiquity and the Judeo-Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the Early Middle Ages belong to the same broad period. Let us take a closer look at the evidence in Jerusalem. Archeology in JerusalemWhether they like to admit it or not, archeologists are confused about Jerusalem. One of their greatest sources of embarrassment is their inability to locate the Roman fort hosting the Tenth Legion after the city was destroyed by Titus in 70 CE. In Aelia Capitolina–Jerusalem in the Roman Period, in Light of Archaeological Research (Brill, 2020), Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah insists on this problem: “Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem . . . no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified.” “One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. . . . At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the ‘lack of remains’.” [42]On the other hand, archeologists and the whole world know where once stood the Herodian temple that Titus’s troops burnt down, for the walls of the “Temple Mount” are still standing. Oddly, this “Temple Mount” overlooking the city has the standard dimensions of a Roman fort. The solution is obvious: the esplanade that Muslims call the Al-Aqsa Compound was originally the Roman fort, first built by Herod in honor of Antony (Fort Antonia), then used by the Tenth Legion. It was arbitrarily determined to be the location of the Temple by the first crusaders in the 11th century, and this mistaken attribution became so entrenched that no one dared question it. When the question was finally raised a few decades ago, it was hushed by the Israeli academic establishment, and would have remained a well-kept secret if not for Ernest L. Martin, who after working for five years with archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, published his unorthodox view in 1994 (read this summary in Popular Archeology). As Gregory Wesley Buchanan wrote in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2011, “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress—the Antonia—that Herod built.” [43] The argument, based on literary sources and archeological evidence, is convincingly presented by Bob Cornuke in this 30-minute film. [44]
Ernest L. Martin’s drawing of Fort Antonia and the probable site of the Temple
This controversy has no direct bearing on Heinsohn’s theory, other than to illustrate the state of confusion of archeology in Jerusalem. What is directly supportive of Heinsohn’s theory, however, is the accepted dating of the Western Wall, consisting of 45 stone courses, 28 of them above ground and 17 underground. The first seven visible layers, comprising very large stone blocks, are from the Herodian period. The four courses of medium-sized stones above them were added during the Umayyad period, while the small stones of the uppermost courses are of more recent date, especially from the Ottoman period. Do 700 years really separate the Herodian courses from the Umayyad courses? Heinsohn questions this assumption, defended by archaeological architect Leen Ritmeyer and others: “Although Ritmeyer knows that the Umayyads have built directly on Jerusalem ruins of 70 AD, he believes that they have been waiting for over 600 years to do so. That is why the Temple Mount is said to have remained empty (‘abandoned’) until the 7th century.” [45]
The Western Wall is not the only piece of evidence of a direct continuity between Romano-Herodian architecture and Umayyad architecture in Jerusalem. Archeologist Orit Peleg-Barkat notes that, “the Umayyad builders used the fragments of Herodian architectural decoration as construction materials.” [46] According to Heinsohn, “there are no series of settlement layers anywhere in Jerusalem which would be required to substantiate the centuries between Imperial Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages of the Umayyads. So, from a purely stratigraphic point of view, the Umayyads lived, at least since 70 AD, side by side with what is called the Jerusalem of Imperial Antiquity (1st-3rd c. AD).” [47]This explains why the Umayyads actually called Jerusalem Iliya, as is attested by their coins, seals and milestones. This is an Arabic form of the name that Hadrian had given the city in the 130s ( Aelia Capitolina). Since that name is supposed to have been abandoned in between, scholars wonder why the Umayyads “revived” it; in reality, the Roman Aelia of Imperial Antiquity and the Muslim Iliya of the Early Middle Ages are one and the same .[48]Our knowledge of the events of this period is too fragmentary and distorted by religious propaganda to reconstruct them with any precision. What seems quite certain, however, is that Jerusalem, like the rest of Syria, was largely inhabited by Arabs. It is said that the Roman legions who fought for Rome in the 60s, were settled in the area, but according to Flavius Josephus these soldiers were mainly recruited in Syria, “from the kings in that neighborhood” ( Jewish Wars, book III, chapter 1). Therefore, writes Heinsohn, “Arab Nabataean soldiers, not men from Italy, conquered Jerusalem for Titus in 70 AD.” The construction of Hadrian’s new city Aelia Capitolina in the 130s was also the work of Arabs, who were master builders (with renowned architects such as Apollodorus of Damascus). [49]Does that mean that the Roman subjugation of Jerusalem with Arab mercenaries in the late 60s is identical to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem 700 years later? No. The Arab mercenaries who fought for Rome against nationalist Jews, then built Aelia Capitolina in honor of Hadrian, cannot be identical with the Arabs who appropriated a Jewish messianic movement and conquered the Levant for themselves after defeating the Byzantine Romans at the Battle of Yarmuk (in 636). Rather, the Arab conquest was a reaction to the Roman conquest, as revisionist scholars suggests—albeit failing to explain the 600 years delay. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that Arabs lived in Jerusalem before they came to rule it under the banner of Islam. And there is no reason to assume that Arab alliances were uniform and stable. Depending on the circumstances, they could fight either for or against the Romans, and either with or against the Jews. Moreover, there was no clear boundary between Jews and their Arab neighbors before Islam. As Steve Mason reminds us, “the Ioudaioi were understood until late antiquity as an ethnic group comparable to other ethnic groups, with their distinctive laws, traditions, customs, and god. They were indeed Judaeans.” [50] The Bible insists on their kinship with Arab tribes and nations such as the Moabites, the Edomites, the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Ishmaelites—all descendants of Abraham. [51] According to David Samuel Margoliouth, ancient Hebrew is an Arabic dialect, and even Yahweh’s name is Arabic ( Relations Between Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of Islam, 1921). [52]Besides, Exodus 2-3 makes the Hebrews’ conquest of Canaan originate from the land of Midian, which roughly corresponds to the Nabataeans’ homeland. Moses was the son-in-law of a Midianite priest ( kohen) and met Yahweh in Midian. [53] Of course, Moses is traditionally dated two millenniums before Muhammad. But the Exodus story, as we have it, may in fact date from the Hasmonean period, as some “minimalist” biblical scholars now tend to assume. [54] The Islamic conquest really seems like a remake of the Mosaic conquest from the same region, and both may be separated by just a couple of centuries; it is always about Arab nomads coveting the Fertile Crescent. At any rate, during the formative years of Islam, Arabs and Jews were ethnically homogeneous. Only when asserting its autonomy did Islam self-consciously widen the gap between Jews and Arabs: this is illustrated by the shift in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem during Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphs, to Petra under the Umayyads, to Mecca under the Abbasids. Islam and ChristianityIf we look at the historical horizon of the Middle East from a Heinsohnian standpoint, we see the birth of Islam roughly contemporary with the birth of Christianity, and not separated by six or seven centuries. There is clear evidence that Islam arose in the context of the early doctrinal controversies surrounding the nature of Christ and the Trinity. Compressing the first millennium into roughly 300 years is not only compatible with the basic facts of religious history, but makes more sense of them. Heinsohn identifies the monophysitism of the Ghassanids with the early Islam of the Umayyads. [55] Islam has also been tied to Arianism by Christian heresiologists. John of Damascus (c. 675-749) assumed that Muhammad devised “the heresy of the Ishmaelites” “after having conversed with an Arian monk.” In the 12th century, the Abbot of Cluny Peter the Venerable thought the same after studying the Latin translation of the Quran that he had commissioned. [56]
Portrait of Libyan priest Arius (detail of a Byzantine icon)
Strangely, Arianism left virtually no known material trace, even in Spain where it is supposed to have been the religion of the ruling Visigoths for three centuries. This is a great puzzlement for scholars like Ralf Bockmann ( “The Non-Archaeology of Arianism,” 2014), or Alexandra Chavarria Arnau (“Finding invisible Arians,” 2017). [57] On the other hand, there is no contemporary written record of the Islamic conquest of Spain, leading some Spanish authors to claim that it never happened—as a military campaign. [58]Arianism is the umbrella name given to the resistance against the full divinization of the man Jesus. The opposite current that focuses on Christ as a divine entity falls under the broad denomination of Gnosticism. And here again, strange things are observed. Ewa Weiling-Feldthusen notes that there is in the long history of Gnosticism a “missing link”, causing “the ever-ending discussions and controversies among scholars” about “the problem of how to fill the temporal gap between the occurrence of Manichaeism (app. third-sixth century) and Paulicianism (app. ninth century) in the European part of Byzantium.” [59] Gnosticism was the most serious competitor to Catholicism during the first three centuries AD, but survived another seven centuries despite the fact that the Catholic Church had become all-powerful in the fourth century. Gnostic movements, covering a millennium in standard chronology—from Marcion’s first compilation of Paul’s epistles, to the crushing of the Bogomils’ heirs in the south of France—appear as different waves of the same movement. Heinsohn has noted that the Paulicians, whose original stronghold was close to Tarsus, had as their spiritual leader a man who called himself Silvanus, a name also born by Paul’s travelling companion. [60]Among the Eastern manifestations of Gnosticism, the “Sabeans” deserve special attention because they are mentioned in the Quran as one of the “peoples of the book,” along the Jews and the Nazarenes. Their Arab name, “Subbas,” means “Bathers” or “Baptists.” They may be affiliated to the Elschasaits, the heterodox Jewish-Christian movement where Mani grew up (Manichaeism was still very influential in Bagdad during the first four centuries of Islam). [61] The Sabeans are also generally recognized as identical to the Mandaeans (from manda, the Aramaic equivalent of the Greek gnosis), who were until 2003 confined to a community of thirteen thousand people in the South of Iraq. Their sacred books are written in an Aramaic dialect bearing much resemblance with the Aramaic once used in Palestine, and their script is close to the Nabataean. Though they live in Iraq and baptize themselves in the Euphrates, their scriptures refer to Jerusalem and the Jordan River, attesting that they came from there, perhaps during the Judeo-Roman Wars. Because they refer to themselves as Nazoraia and honor John the Baptist, the travelling missionaries who first met them in 1652 called them “Christians of Saint John”. But, as B. R. S. Mead explains in her authoritative study, their holy scriptures show John cursing Jesus, calling him a devilish false prophet. It is now assumed that the Mandaeans descend from the disciples of John the Baptist, whom the Gospels portray as competitors to the disciples of Jesus. [62] The survival of John the Baptist’s sect for so many centuries is one of the most intriguing riddle in the history of religions, and makes more sense within the framework of Heinsohn’s short chronology. The history of the different offshoots of heterodox Judaism is still rife with enigmas, and arguably some of them can find a solution within the Heinsohnian paradigm that makes the births of Christianity in Imperial Antiquity, of Manichaeism in Late Antiquity, and of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, roughly contemporary.
But, as I said, there are still hundreds of questions waiting for a plausible answer, and more research is needed before a paradigm shift in global chronology can begin to shake the entrenched academic establishment. Notes[2] Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and Their Chinese Sources,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, no. 35, 2012, pp. 11–87, on www.jstor.org [3] According to Paola Supino Martini, the “Caroline minuscule” was a “revival of models of the ancient minuscule”, and so was the majuscule “uncial” used for luxurious manuscripts (Paola Supino Martini, “Société et culture écrite,” in André Vauchez ed., Rome au Moyen Âge, Éditions du Cerf, 2021, pp. 351-384[358]). [10] J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West 400-1000, Blackwell (1967), 2004, p. 47. [11] We read in the introduction of Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon, 1999, p. 1: “The Life of Constantine ( Vita Constantini, henceforth VC) is the main source not only for the religious policy of Constantine the Great (ruled ad 306±37, sole Emperor 324±37) but also for much else about him. . . . it is not surprising that it has proved extremely controversial. Some scholars are disposed to accept its evidence at face value while others have been and are highly skeptical. Indeed, the integrity of Eusebius as a writer has often been attacked and his authorship of the VC denied by scholars eager to discredit the value of the evidence it provides, with discussion focusing particularly on the numerous imperial documents which are cited verbatim in the work. In contrast, T. D. Barnes’s major book on Constantine, for example, makes substantial use of the VC, and the work remains the single most important source for Constantine.” [12] Walter Bauer, Orthodoxie et hérésie au début du christianisme (1934) , Cerf, 2009, pp. 74-88. Also Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (1987), Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.. [13] Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 321-1308, Princeton UP, 1980, pp. 70-71. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill nottes in The Barbarian West 400-1000, Blackwell (1967), 2004, p. 30 “the earliest papal documents (dating from the late fourth century) derives from a chancery unmistakably modelled upon the Roman imperial chancery.” [14] Joseph Atwill, Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Flavian Signature Edition), CreateSpace, 2011. [15] Francesco Carotta, Jesus was Caesar: On the Julian Origin of Christianity, An Investigative Report, Aspekt, 2005. This book, and other researches done since, has led me to renounce my earlier working hypothesis that Julius Caesar was a fictitious character. [16] Robert I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215, Basil Blackwell, 2000. [17] Hélène Toubert, “Le renouveau paléochrétien à Rome au début du XIIe siècle,” in Cahiers Archéologiques, 29, 1970, pp. 99-154. [34] Heinsohn, “Jerusalem in the First Millennium AD” (2021), pp. 59-60, referring to M.D. Bukharin, “Towards the Earliest History of Kinda”, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2009, pp. 64-80 (67). [36] Alfred-Louis de Prémare, Les Fondations de l’islam, Seuil, 2002, p. 41-56; David Samuel Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, Putnam’s Sons, 1905, p. 35-39. [37] Gordon Darnell Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia, From Ancient Times to Their Ecclipse under Islam, University of South Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 17, 47, 105. [38] Günther Lüling, A Challenge to Islam for Reformation (1993), Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2003 (on books.google.fr), pp. xii-xv. [39] Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge UP, 1977 (archive.org), pp. 6-30. In 1998, Robert Hoyland refined Crone and Cook’s thesis by providing other sources in Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam ( online here). [42] Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, Aelia Capitolina – Jerusalem in the Roman Period: In Light of Archaeological Research, Brill, 2020, pp. 21-22, 42-43. [48] Heinsohn, “Jerusalem in the First Millennium AD” (2021), p. 69. Heinsohn refers to I.M. Baidoun 2015/16, “Arabic names of Jerusalem on coins and in historical sources until the early ‘Abbāsid period’”, Israel Numismatic Journal, 19, pp. 142-150, (145-46).
[51] Moab is Abraham’s nephew (Genesis 19:31-38), Edom or Esau is Abraham’s grandson (25:25), Amaleq is Esau’s grandson (36:12), and the Midianites are descendants of Abraham by his second wife Keturah (25:2-4), while the Ishmaelites are descendants of Abraham by his servant Agar. [52] David Samuel Margoliouth, Relations Between Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of Islam: The Schweich Lectures 1921, Oxford UP, 1924. [53] The Midianite hypothesis was first formulated by Friedrich Ghillany (1863, under the pseudonym of Richard von der Alm) and Karl Budde (1899), and has now gained the support of top biblicar scholars such as Thomas Römer ( The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2016). [54] Philip Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”: A Study in Biblical Origins, Journal of the Study of the Old Testament, 1992. [58] Ignacio Olagüe, Les Arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne, Flammarion, 1969. The thesis is supported by Spanish Arabist González Ferrín. [61] Guy Monnot, Islam et religions, Maisonneuve & Larose, 1986. [62] B. R. S. Mead, The Gnostic John the Baptizer: Selections from the Mandean John-Book Together with Studies on John and Christian Origins, John M. Watkins, 1924.
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