Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Phantom Time

In June 2005, at a conference in Toronto on "Anomalous Eras - Best Evidence: Best Theory," Heribert Illig presented a paper he called "The Invented Middle Ages." It was not the first time this theory of history had been presented to the public—it had been known in Germany since 1996—but the first time it had been presented outside of Europe. In it, he explained his path to finding an anomaly in the historical record: that 300 years of our history did not exist! This theory is called the "Phantom Time Hypothesis."

Illig was born in 1947 in Germany. He studied economics, mathematics, physics, some art history and Egyptology, and describes himself as "not a historian in the narrow sense of the word." While reading the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky (that Earth has barely survived closes passes by Venus and Mars, before they settled into their present orbits, and that these fly-bys took place within the memory of ancient man and were recorded as myths), he began to question the historical record in Egypt, which led him to co-author a book, Wann lebten die Pharaonen? (When Did the Pharaohs Live?).

Diagram of missing and "recalibrated" years.
Once he was comfortable with questioning the accepted history of the human race, he started looking at the Middle Ages. He asked himself questions. Why did certain documents with earlier dates only get discovered later? How far off might the calendar have been by the time Pope Gregory insisted it be fixed? Could the engineering of Charlemagne's time really produce a building like the Chapel of Aachen, which looks to be part of Romanesque architecture style, which only existed two centuries after Charlemagne? As for Charlemagne himself: did he really create a re-birth from 768-814, when everything on either side of him is still "dark," and could one man possibly have done all that scholars say he did? How much can we trust those periods in western Europe that we now call "Dark Ages"?

His conclusion: there is a gap of years, from 614 to 911, for which any dates and events ascribed did not in fact take place. Essentially, a 300-year span has been "presumed" by historians who have tried to make sense of the unclear and inaccurate data we have; methods of radiometric and dendrochronological dating are unreliable, et cetera. Others have picked up on this and added to it; of course, he also has his opponents.

Illig has to assume enormous errors on the part of archaeologists and historians, as well as an elaborate conspiracy taking place in the centuries after 911 to "record" history that took place in the three centuries previous. Some of his arguments result from his misunderstanding of Gregorian calendar reform and dating methods. Some are just assumptions that contemporary witnesses are untrustworthy.

Is there a chance he's right? Is it possible that we are living in the year 1715 CE? Fortunately, astronomy helps. The Persian Wars between Greece and Persia lasted from 499-449 BCE.* The Greek historians of the wars tell of two solar eclipses taking place not far apart. The only times for two solar eclipses near each other in that part of the world were 2492 years ago and 2490 years ago, on 2 October 480 BCE and 14 February 478 BCE.

So there it is. No missing time. Thanks, science!

*One of these battles, Marathon, is remembered in the present day in footraces across the world. Another battle, Thermopylae, gave us the plot for the movie "300."

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Eclipse in 828

A lunar eclipse was recorded for July 1 in 828 very early in the morning. A second one occurred on Christmas Day, and was recorded thusly in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
In this year the Moon was eclipsed on mid-winter's Mass-night, and the same year King Ecgbert subdued the kingdom of the Mercians and all that was South of the Humber.
Note the lack of panic, such as we expect from Hollywood's portrayal of technologically primitive people experiencing an eclipse. Even if your theory of the heavens were no more sophisticated than perceiving heavenly bodies as balls of light affixed to concentric crystal spheres, you would realize that they could simply overlap at times. The Babylonians and Greeks had figured out the patterns of eclipses centuries earlier than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) in his Etymologies (which was used throughout the Middle Ages the way we would use an encyclopedia) explained
"The moon suffers an eclipse if the shadow of the earth comes between it and the sun" while an eclipse of the sun takes place "when the new moon is in line with the sun and obstructs and obscures it."
While Medieval Europe had Isidore to explain what was happening, however, they did not necessarily have the knowledge of the Babylonians and Greeks to understand why it was happening. The event could still be unnerving. Bishop Eligius of Noyon in the 7th century warned: "When the moon is darkened, no one should dare to utter shouts, because it becomes dark at specific times at God's command." Hrabanus Maurus (c.780-c.856), another encylopedist, tells of a lunar eclipse when some threw spears toward the moon, trying to defend it from its attacker.

Even if the mechanism of eclipses was understood, people might still accept them as a sign of great portent, or as the result of human actions. Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, referring to an eclipse of 990, wrote "I urge all Christians that they should truly believe that this does not happen on account of some incantations by wicked women, nor by eating, and it cannot be helped by any action in the world."

Oh, and when Astronomy Today tells you that the eclipse of May 5, 840 so frightened King Louis that he "died just afterwards"? Ask to see their sources. Louis died on June 20th at the age of 62, after years of quelling civil wars. I think there are likelier reasons or his death than being afraid of an eclipse.