The Phantom Time Hypothesis

[82_28]

Were nearly 300 years subtracted or interpolated in the Middle ages making us now really living in the 1700s and nearly 300 years of perceived history actually never happened?

This the best and most simple write-up that explains it so far that I've been able to find.

I'm writing a paper on the "Phantom Time Hypothesis". You can Google this, or refer to this paper by Niemitz http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile ... z-1997.pdf, or this by Illig http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophi ... _paper.htm, or this article about it on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A84012040. Briefly, the hypothesis is that in order to reconcile the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendar, we have to remove 300 years from the 'official' calendar. Illig reckons these years would be 614-911. Thus many popes, emperors, wars &c never existed. The hypothesis explains this as a massive conspiracy. The entire history of that period was invented by Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, whose conventional dates are given as 980 –1002, but who really lived 300 years before that, from about 680 to 702. However, in connivance with Pope Sylvester II, he decided to convince everybody they were living at the end of the First Millennium, because it was a wonderful opportunity for positive PR, and Otto liked the idea of reigning in the Year 1000. “It was such a nice, round number”. He changed the dates, and got scribes to write an extra 300 years of history.

I have my own ideas about this but welcome the thoughts of people here. In particular, I am interested in how ordinary people in the early middle ages actually recorded years. Did they really rely on priests to tell them the time (it is essential to the hypothesis that the whole Church was involved in the conspiracy)? Or did they record dates and years in their own way? How often did official documents record the exact date?

My only knowledge of reference to dates is Bede, who includes a whole chronology of the world in his book on the English Church and people. (However, Bede was living right in the middle of the 'phantom period' so perhaps his works were a later forgery).

Thanks

Edward

http://medievalstudies.livejournal.com/331265.html

I have not read the paper that makes this claim yet. But I absolutely love the idea in the sense of being fascinated by it. I spent the day reading all I could, besides the paper itself, yet, and I cannot understand why this idea is pure anathema to others to even remotely consider. Metafilter had a lengthy thread of a bunch of too cool for school comments last year. Fair enough.

But just as I am formulating an argument to answer the questions in my head, I randomly came across this:



Texas A&M Picked Up Two National Championships, Two Conference Titles Over The Summer

You're looking at two photos of Texas A&M's Kyle Field, both via Rant Sports. The top was taken last season, the bottom snapped just this week. Pretend this is one of those "spot the differences" bar games, and see if you can tell what's new. Yep, the Aggies' history managed to get a lot more storied over the offseason.

Two "new" national titles, in 1919 and 1927. Two new Big 12 championships, in 1997 and 2010.

The reason is because the NCAA has never had an official D 1-A/FBS national champion. Even in the modern era, the winner is merely the "BCS Champion." (The NCAA does name a national champion, but it's the FCS winner, where there's actually a playoff in place. Yes, your defending college football national champions are the North Dakota State Bison.)

Competitive sport hates a void. So, over the years, there have been numerous attempt to decide a champion, relying on either pure math, or a poll of educated voters. Especially in the early days of college football, these systems were developed with regularity, and were eradicated just as quickly, and were often in direct competition with each other. At times in the 1920s, there were more than 10 competing systems. It wasn't weird for five or six different schools in any given year to have a claim to a title. Texas A&M isn't strictly inventing championships, but it's citing more obscure ones, that even in their time weren't taken that seriously.

• In 1919, either Harvard or Illinois won the title, depending on who you talked to. But the National Championship Foundation, which was formed in 1980, polled its voters to choose retroactive championships for every year dating back to 1869. For 1919, they declared a three-way tie between Harvard, Notre Dame, and Texas A&M.

The Billingsley Report, the creation of programmer Richard Billingsley, also retroactively declared champions beginning in 1996, including the undefeated 1919 Aggies. It is purely mathematical, arguably quite flawed, and has become an actual component of the BCS Standings.

• In 1927, Illinois was the closest thing to a consensus champion those confusing 1920s could offer. But the Sagarin Ratings, the computer formula devised in the 1980s by Jeff Sagarin and more familiarly used for basketball, declared the Aggies the national champs that year.

The conference titles are easier to sort out.

• In 1997, the Aggies finished first in the Big 12 South—though with the third best record in the entire conference. In the conference title game, they were blown out by Nebraska. They're still claiming that year as a conference championship.

• In 2010, there was a three-way tie in the Big 12 South, with Texas A&M coming in third by the tiebreaker of overall record. (There was also a tie in the North division, meaning that literally every team that finished above .500 can technically boast a conference championship that season.) The Aggies didn't even go to the conference title game, but still claim the conference title.

It's called the "mythical" national championship, but a better term for A&M's titles are technical. Sure, they had national championships, according to someone—but they're only valid if you're willing to accept all those other great national champions over the years, like the Centre College Praying Colonels in 1919, Tom Osborne's 9-3 Huskers in 1981, or Boise State in 2006. In other words: enjoy those fake titles, Aggies. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

http://deadspin.com/5941380/texas-am-pi ... the-summer

So what we're looking at is a contemporary way to fake facts within marginally reasonable, livable distances in time and must assume nobody will notice -- here in the age of the Internet. Who is to grapple with this? Who cares? I sure don't. But this is definitive proof that time and history can be fucked with here at this very day and the level of difficulty given almost a thousand years makes it exponential.

Did yokels back in 680 have calendars on their fridges? Did they keep their wrist watches up to spec? Were their cellphones synched to network time?

No. Lower class peeps didn't even know what year they were born for the most part as late as dates as 1903 and even beyond that.

I simply don't think this can be a hypothesis that can be dismissed. Even if it didn't happen, I am sure it partially always happens and always has because it is obvious it can.

[8bitagent]

Time, placement, etc has been on my mind a lot lately. How we interpret memories, how we sense...well time.

In fact ya know what word shows up the most in both titles and content on Jeff's RI entries? "Time". I mean other than "to" "and" "of" and "the".

Hell even blowhard teapartarian Alex Jones had an article today questioning this sense of time we live in and asking if there is multiple time experiences going on
http://www.prisonplanet.com/working-on- ... locks.html

[justdrew]

a favorite pet theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29

an earlier related thread ...
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9317

also, the 60s didn't end until the death of Elvis Presley in '77 and then by late '78 it was really already the early 80s, so the 70's really only happened in late-77 to early-78, the one year decade. Of course, the 60s didn't really start 'til about '64.

Presley's last single...

[jingofever]

Philip K. Dick had a phantom time hypothesis that he summed up with the phrase, "The empire never ended."

[8bitagent]

a favorite pet theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29

an earlier related thread ...
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9317

also, the 60s didn't end until the death of Elvis Presley in '77 and then by late '78 it was really already the early 80s, so the 70's really only happened in late-77 to early-78, the one year decade. Of course, the 60s didn't really start 'til about '64.

Presley's last single...

Sweet! As I was born in 1978:) Younger generations are taught that 20's through 60's looked picturesque. But then everything was ugly in the 70's. I do have to say, I dig the look (via film and photos) of the early 60's. So mod. Seeing all those rare color photos of the 30's and 40's in struggling America was quite an eye opener

[Dradin Kastell]

Did yokels back in 680 have calendars on their fridges? Did they keep their wrist watches up to spec? Were their cellphones synched to network time?

No. Lower class peeps didn't even know what year they were born for the most part as late as dates as 1903 and even beyond that.

I simply don't think this can be a hypothesis that can be dismissed. Even if it didn't happen, I am sure it partially always happens and always has because it is obvious it can.

I'll post here a similar answer I posted at the blog already. What about the world outside the Christendom? I mean OK, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor could conceivably pull something like this off the lands they rule in a secular and spiritual fashion. But that leaves a major part of the known world unaccounted for.

The Dar-al-Islam is a major case in point. The new religion created by the prophet Mohammed spread like wildfire in the Mediterranian sphere during this exact time period. If we assume the theory is true, how did this new religion controlling a vast land area from India to Spain pop up into existence in a few short years instead of about two centuries?

The early islamic centers of power had pretty advanced timekeeping and science themselves and arguably there are several extant independently verifiable chronicles written by islamic scholars dating to the "Phantom" period. And there are Islamic scientists that we still are indebted to, in the field of mathematics for example. A quick look into Wikipedia gave me the names of the following men of learning who arguably lived during this "Phantom" period:

Ahmed ibn Yusuf (835, Baghdad - 912, Egypt) - mathematician
Al-Asma'i (739, Basra, Iraq - 831, Basra, Iraq) pioneer of zoology, botany and animal husbandry
Al-Battani (850, Harran, Turkey - 929, Qasr al-Jiss, Iraq) astronomer and mathematician
Ibn Duraid (837, Basra, Iraq - 934, Baghdad, Iraq) geographer, genealogist, poet, and philologist
Ibn Hawqal (943, Baghdad,Iraq - 969,? ) writer, geographer, and chronicler
Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī (893, Yemen - 945, Sanaa, Yemen) geographer, historian and astronomer
Ibn Abi Ishaq (died AD 735) the earliest known grammarian of the Arabic language
Al-Jahiz (776, Basra, Iraq - 869, Basra, Iraq) historian, biologist and author
Al-Jawhari, Abu Alabbas (ca. 800-860) mathematician
Khalil ibn Ahmad (c. 718, Oman – c. 791) writer and philologist, compiled the first dictionary of the Arabic language, the Kitab al-Ayn
Al-Kindi (c. 801, Kufa, Iraq – 873, Bahgdad, Iraq) Arab philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, physician and geographer
Al-Masudi ( ?, Baghdad, Iraq - 957, Cairo, Egypt) historian, geographer and philosopher, traveled to Spain, Russia, India, Sri Lanka and China, spent his last years in Syria and Egypt
Al-Uqlidisi (920, Damascus, Syria - 980, Damascus, Syria) wrote two works on arithmetic, may have anticipated the invention of decimals
Waddah al-Yaman (Yemen,? - Syria,Damscus,709) poet, famous for his erotic and romantic poems
Al-Zahrawi (936, Cordoba, Spain - 1013, Cordoba, Spain) Islam's greatest medieval surgeon, wrote comprehensive medical texts combining Middle-Eastern, Indian and Greco-Roman classical teachings, shaped European surgical procedures until the Renaissance, considered the "father Of surgery", wrote Al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume collection of medical practice.

Simply put, is the Mohammedan faith and are, say, several caliphates just a sham invented by a Holy Roman Emperor and a Pope? The work involved in faking all the history, culture, architecture, science etc. in areas one does not control seems pretty gargantuan, even for massed ranks of armed medieval monks.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

What about the world outside the Christendom? I mean OK, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor could conceivably pull something like this off the lands they rule in a secular and spiritual fashion. But that leaves a major part of the known world unaccounted for.

The Dar-al-Islam is a major case in point. The new religion created by the prophet Mohammed spread like wildfire in the Mediterranian sphere during this exact time period. If we assume the theory is true, how did this new religion controlling a vast land area from India to Spain pop up into existence in a few short years instead of about two centuries?

The early islamic centers of power had pretty advanced timekeeping and science themselves and arguably there are several extant independently verifiable chronicles written by islamic scholars dating to the "Phantom" period. And there are Islamic scientists that we still are indebted to, in the field of mathematics for example. A quick look into Wikipedia gave me the names of the following men of learning who arguably lived during this "Phantom" period:

Ahmed ibn Yusuf (835, Baghdad - 912, Egypt) - mathematician
Al-Asma'i (739, Basra, Iraq - 831, Basra, Iraq) pioneer of zoology, botany and animal husbandry
Al-Battani (850, Harran, Turkey - 929, Qasr al-Jiss, Iraq) astronomer and mathematician
Ibn Duraid (837, Basra, Iraq - 934, Baghdad, Iraq) geographer, genealogist, poet, and philologist
Ibn Hawqal (943, Baghdad,Iraq - 969,? ) writer, geographer, and chronicler
Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī (893, Yemen - 945, Sanaa, Yemen) geographer, historian and astronomer
Ibn Abi Ishaq (died AD 735) the earliest known grammarian of the Arabic language
Al-Jahiz (776, Basra, Iraq - 869, Basra, Iraq) historian, biologist and author
Al-Jawhari, Abu Alabbas (ca. 800-860) mathematician
Khalil ibn Ahmad (c. 718, Oman – c. 791) writer and philologist, compiled the first dictionary of the Arabic language, the Kitab al-Ayn
Al-Kindi (c. 801, Kufa, Iraq – 873, Bahgdad, Iraq) Arab philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, physician and geographer
Al-Masudi ( ?, Baghdad, Iraq - 957, Cairo, Egypt) historian, geographer and philosopher, traveled to Spain, Russia, India, Sri Lanka and China, spent his last years in Syria and Egypt
Al-Uqlidisi (920, Damascus, Syria - 980, Damascus, Syria) wrote two works on arithmetic, may have anticipated the invention of decimals
Waddah al-Yaman (Yemen,? - Syria,Damscus,709) poet, famous for his erotic and romantic poems
Al-Zahrawi (936, Cordoba, Spain - 1013, Cordoba, Spain) Islam's greatest medieval surgeon, wrote comprehensive medical texts combining Middle-Eastern, Indian and Greco-Roman classical teachings, shaped European surgical procedures until the Renaissance, considered the "father Of surgery", wrote Al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume collection of medical practice.

Simply put, is the Mohammedan faith and are, say, several caliphates just a sham invented by a Holy Roman Emperor and a Pope? The work involved in faking all the history, culture, architecture, science etc. in areas one does not control seems pretty gargantuan, even for massed ranks of armed medieval monks.

But aren't the years listed above those of the current western calendar, not established until the 16th century? And wouldn't those same scientists have used the Islamic calendar anyway? In other words, this history, just like everything else of the period, was dated ex post facto regardless.

[Dradin Kastell]

But aren't the years listed above those of the current western calendar, not established until the 16th century? And wouldn't those same scientists have used the Islamic calendar anyway? In other words, this history, just like everything else of the period, was dated ex post facto regardless.

The theory, though, says that three centuries of events were simply made up, never happened and according to original timekeeping we are now living the early 18th century.

That means that when we consider the chronology of events in the islamic world, the options are that

1) They too are made up by Europeans
2) The events said to take three centuries happened in only a handful of years
3) The whole chronology has to be pushed back 300 years

It seems to me that each of the options is wrought with its own set of problems. First is, like I wrote, a task of obviously gargantuan proportions; it possibly includes the need of European military interventions in North Africa and the Middle East and the whole of the learned capabilities of Europe harnessed to this history-falsification and brainwashing on a grand scale.

The second would mean that a huge number of events recorded locally happened in the islamic world (and medieval islamic scholars cranked out science at a phenomenal rate) in a very short time period, oddly coinciding with the falsification of the calendar. A huge number of Classical scientific works that had been lost in Europe came to be known again in Christendom through Arabic translations made in the centuries that coincide with the "Phantom" period. Many works by Ptolemy, Aristotle, Euclid, etc. could be only "rediscovered" via Latin translations (like Gerard of Cremona's at around 1150) when found in libraries built by Muslim rulers full of books, original treatises or translated classical works, by Muslim scholars. Accepting the theory of a "Phantom" period means that this scientific transfer from the previous centuries and original scientific research did not a lot of time and effort by several generations of hard-working men of letters and insight, but was realized possibly in just a decade.

And the last option would mean that European, Mediterranian and Near Eastern history would have to be falsified retroactively, expunging the knowledge of the rise of Islamic power during the late Roman Empire and moving those events forward into the Early Medieval period. It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the implications, but it seems this would have meant, for example, that St. Augustine actually lived in Hippo Regius in North Africa during the time the area was being conquered by the armed followers of Mohammed. And in fact the whole history of the Byzantine Empire would had to be rewritten. That would also be a sizable project, though not as big as the option number 1.

[stefano]

What Dradin said. It's not like Europe was a vacuum; many of the events that took place during this supposedly lost period were huge events in both worlds. Off the top of my head, the defeat of the Moors at Poitiers, which this theory, if I have it right, thinks was invented.

You could consider the fact that, at least on this H2G2 page, the emotional basis of the theory seems to be that if white people did nothing interesting for a few centuries, those centuries must have been made up. My bold:

The term 'Dark Ages' is in disrepute to describe the period between 500-1000 CE – Common Era. (For those unfamiliar with this politically correct term, the years are equivalent to 'Anno Domini', or 'AD'). During this period, it was formerly believed, Western Europeans did very little that would interest historians, or indeed anybody not directly related to them. They produced almost no literature, art, or cultural artefacts. They made no appreciable progress in agriculture or technology. They didn't even have any interesting wars. This bothered scholars.

[MayDay]

I guess I think about this too often and too deeply, because sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am nearly sure I'm in a slightly different timeline than the one I went to sleep in. Somehow this doesn't drive me all that crazy, although psychiatry would doubtlessly label me psychotic for it. It actually makes my life more interesting.

I swear to you, I missed that 5 am flight in July. I'm still in Texas. But no, I was the last to board, the captain or perhaps co-pilot let me on at the last second and closed the door to the terminal behind me. And, judging by the view of green mountains to my left, I'm certainly not in Texas. So it goes, although that may not be how it went.

[JackRiddler]

I like this one a lot. It's kind of like flat-earth theory for the sophisticated. One of those who apparently espouses it is the totally leading Russian dissident who's bound to be the legitimate president as soon as the State Department can cook up a credible coup for him (which is never), Garry Kasparov. Sorry, I should of course introduce him as perhaps the greatest chess champion of all time, which is a fucking impressive credential, no?

[Harvey]

A few things spring to mind.

1) If the hypothesis is in any way correct it has profound implications for archeo-astronomy, which should have reared ugly heads before now.

2) Carbon dating of existing historically placed artefacts against known/believed dates should clear up a few misconceptions.

3) History is a collection of narratives (written by the winners) rather than a complete account of known events. I think of history as an inverse pyramid, the up facing wide base of which is pure supposition, the down facing fine point of which is the nugget of truth. This means that history is at best a partial teacher of what is, or what was. More reasonable to think of what might have been.

4) Time measurement has changed and developed considerably 'over time' (see J T Fraser, Of Time Passion and Knowledge) in other words, it is an arbitrary artefact of culture. In other words, time and subsequently dates, are no more than what we say they are.

5) The common experience of time today is in no way any indication of it's correct description in the past, in other words, before commonly agreed standards.

6) Time is probably a multiple dimensional object, the further dimensions of which are only available through energy expensive paths or energy gradients. So don't expect concrete answers any time soon.

7) From my limited experience, time is likely an a-causal sequence rather than a strictly causal sequence, in other words, just because A looks like it caused B it ain't necessarily so. B occurs after A and yet causes or seems to cause A to exist before B occurred. In the grand scheme of history, every possible explanation is most likely up for grabs

8 ) I remember a number of competing histories which are mutually exclusive. Not all of them can be true in all times. Some of them must be untrue. In other words, time is dependant upon which universe you are viewing time from. Therefore history is subjective rather than objective. Therefore nothing can be said to be 'historically' true.

Or something like that.

All of this is filtered through several pints of traditional scrumpy so expect errors. As a field it's entirely Darwinian, survival of the fittest shall reign.

Interesting stuff though.

[Hammer of Los]

...

B occurs after A and yet causes or seems to cause A to exist before B occurred.

P K Dick.

We doth run backwards.

...

[82_28]

More here in a post that just popped up "today". Short read.

http://io9.com/did-a-pope-and-an-empero ... 1651594813

[Joao]

Thanks 82_28 for returning this to the front page. I quite enjoy the idea, even if just for the sake of fringe novelty, and wish there was somewhere I knew of where it saw more informed discussion. It's one of the few conspiracy theories (so-called) which hasn't yet been beaten to death. And while the particulars of any hypothesis deserve skepticism, it's easy to believe that the historical record is rife with inaccuracies, perhaps even fundamental ones.

For the record, there are several distinct flavors which are nevertheless often conflated:

• Phantom Time: A historical conspiracy theory advanced by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig (b. 1947) which proposes that historical events between AD 614 and 911 in the Early Middle Ages of Europe and neighboring regions are either wrongly dated, or did not occur at all, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact.
  
  
• New Chronology: A fringe theory regarded by the majority of the academic community as pseudohistory, which argues that the conventional chronology of Middle Eastern and European history is fundamentally flawed, and that events attributed to the civilizations of the Roman Empire, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The central concepts of the New Chronology are derived from the ideas of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854-1946), although work by French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) can be viewed as an earlier predecessor. However, the New Chronology is most commonly associated with Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945), although published works on the subject are actually a collaboration between Fomenko and several other mathematicians.
  
  
• Revised Chronology: Immanuel Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed. This was the reason for the apparent absence of correlation between the Biblical account and those of neighboring cultures, and also the cause of the enigmatic "Dark Ages" in Greece and elsewhere. Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries (a scheme he called the Revised Chronology), placing The Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. He proposed numerous other synchronisms stretching up to the time of Alexander the Great. He argued that these eliminate phantom "Dark Ages", and vindicate the biblical accounts of history and those recorded by Herodotus.

A few variants on Velikovsky's ideas are also out there, and the intrepid reader can find more at the links above. (And there are surely others of which I'm not currently aware.)

From a dilettante's perspective, at least, Fomenko's New Chronology is perhaps the most interesting because it forgoes an entire millennium. The thread which justdrew linked above ("Massive historical fraud: this isn't 2006, it's 942 AD") has some worthwhile discussion on the New Chronology. There's also a series of Russian videos on the NC, but I'm only aware of one episode with English subtitles:



It's been a while since I watched this; No endorsements made. I once found Bulgarian subtitles for the rest of the series and attempted to machine-translate them into English, but the results were, predictably, all but unintelligible.

Edited to add: I found a podcast about Fomenko and was briefly riled to realize it was actually a mockery, but I have to admit there were some funny parts, including "Glasnost happened four and a half months ago. It's also the same year that Atilla the Hun went over the Alps with his elephants."