Did the early medieval era ever take place?

https://jonn.substack.com/p/did-the-early-medieval-era-ever-really

by memorable • 4 years ago

298 275 4 years ago

jonn.substack.com

lukeqsee• 4 years ago

Clever presentation of the basics of how conspiracy theories begin, are substantiated, and then can (often) be refuted by zooming out and regaining a little perspective.

blowski11• 4 years ago

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco is a fantastic novel for doing this. You find yourself sucked right into the conspiracy, only for him to then reveal the facts that destroy it.

There’s a subplot on how the number of letters in a document proves the Templars possession of the Holy Grail. A character then shows how a random shopping list follows a similar pattern.

tsimionescu8• 4 years ago

One of the most memorable lines from the novel for me was something along the lines of "if you lend too much credence to symbolism, you end up believing the male penis is only there as a phallic symbol" (said by the main character's girlfriend, if I remember correctly).

It's also fun to read Umberto Eco's take on Dan Brown and his Da Vinci's Code. Eco was joking that he feels he should get some credit for the whole thing, as Dan Brown is so clearly just a character from Foucault's Pendulum.

abnercoimbre• 4 years ago

Aw man, this should have had a spoiler warning. Could be a good feature for HN.

InitialLastName3• 4 years ago

Save yourself a step and read the Illuminatus! trilogy first.

There's a clear lineage of bonkers conspiracy theories getting more popularly approachable from Illuminatus! to Foucault's Pendulum to Dan Brown.

corsac2• 4 years ago

can (often) be refuted by zooming out and regaining a little perspective.

I think this is exactly why it is so maddeningly hard to engage critically with those who espouse these theories – they keep an 'authoritative' death-grip on the frame.

rado• 4 years ago

Cool movie idea.

kochikame• 4 years ago

Well, I mean, in the sense that basically all historical ages are invented by people long after that time and would not have been recognized as such by the people who lived through it, then, no.

The early moderns didn't know they were in early modernity. The fall of the Roman Empire was constructed as a narrative long after the facts became clear. We don't know what age we are living in right now that will someday be named by future historians (probably as the "last bit before the climate went tits up" or words to that effect)

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

"last bit before the climate went tits up"

indeed, Great tits could be wiped out by climate change in the near future https://nypost.com/2020/11/11/great-tits-could-be-wiped-out-... (first line: We mean the birds, dirtbags.)

permo-w2• 4 years ago

the Victorians could have made a fairly safe bet that they were living in the era of Victoria

NoGravitas5• 4 years ago

Imagine thinking there will be future historians.

The crows will have an interesting time explaining the worldwide ash horizon in the soil a million years from now, though.

closedloop129• 4 years ago

The Late Latin adjective modernus, a derivation from the adverb modo "presently, just now", is attested from the 5th century, at first in the context of distinguishing the Christian era from the pagan era. In the 6th century, Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to use modernus "modern" regularly to refer to his own age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#Etymology

int_19h2• 4 years ago

For more on how what we now term "the fall of the empire" manifested itself to common citizens at the time:

https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/

toast0• 4 years ago

Time began January 1, 1970 UTC. Anything before then didn't really happen.

blowski11• 4 years ago

And will end 19 January 2038 03:14:07 UTC.

Dylan168074• 4 years ago

If there is nothing outside that range, then what do you do with 0x80000000? Reject it outright?

twic• 4 years ago

No, we'll just to back to the start and live through the 1970s again.

bhaak4• 4 years ago

Time is signed though so time actually began at 1901-12-13T20:45:52Z.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

Unless your time oracle is NTP in which case time is unsigned starting in 1900.

bregma2• 4 years ago

Time is not guaranteed to be signed. W Hat you have there is undefined behaviour.

aidenn0• 4 years ago

On some systems errno is not set by a failed call to time() in which case the only way to check for an error is if the returned value is (time_t)-1 which makes it impossible to unambiguously represent 1 second before the epoch.

mrwnmonm5• 4 years ago

You have to find this joke on HN :)

antognini• 4 years ago

The point about the Gregorian calendar being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13 is especially interesting because it's easy to see how you could regard it as a sort of "smoking gun" of the Phantom Time Hypothesis. The supposed lack of archaeological evidence is suggestive, but can be pretty easily dismissed with "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But here you have a prediction that about 300 years are missing and this would directly explain the observed discrepancy in the drift of the calendar.

As the author points out the problem is resolved because the Gregorian calendar reform only intended to reset the calendar back to the time of the Council of Nicaea, not the date when the Julian calendar was originally adopted.

It's a neat example of how a theory's smoking gun can sometimes have an entirely unrelated explanation and a warning that even when you think you've found conclusive proof, it's important to keep digging.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

This. But even what the article agrees with is wrong: "It only works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the decline of Rome left a nasty gap in the records." -- There is not really a gap. We have fewer records, but still covering a lot. They may not be autographs, but that is not very different from the situation with antiquity. And when it comes to supporting chronology, numismatics is probably the best evidence. It would be impossible for a forger of history to bury hundreds of thousands of matching coins all over Europe.

prox2• 4 years ago

I have always found the history around the Holy Roman Emperor interesting, with prince electors : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor as a basis of continuing the Roman Empire in the west.

As it is I think we know little what happened to aristocratic families at the end of the Empire as well.

bhaak4• 4 years ago

We know so little that there is no verified unbroken lineage between anybody from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

tomatocracy• 4 years ago

I rather like Gibbon's argument that the Ottoman empire was effectively the continuation of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman empire - by that line of thinking the ultimate surviving descendant of the Roman Empire fought in the First World War.

jack_pp• 4 years ago

Absence of evidence actually is (weak) evidence of absence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of...

alxlaz• 4 years ago

There is no absence of evidence, not by a long shot. There are fewer written records in the traditional sense (books, letters, legal documents concerning things like transfer of property) but there is no shortage of inscriptions on various sorts of things, for example -- not to mention every other kind of historical evidence and, of course, the fact that some aspects of early medieval Western chronology can be cross-checked against contemporary sources in North Africa and the Middle East. We call it "the Dark Age" by comparison with, say, Late Antiquity, but even so, we have vastly more evidence about what happened in this age in Western Europe than we have about what happened in various ages of Antiquity all over the place, and no one thins those were made up.

As for the article you linked to, that kind of probabilistic approach sort of works for recent events. Applying it to things that happened a long time ago, where the presence or absence of evidence is correlated with a whole lot of other things, from court historians making shit up to cows tripping up over a lamp light and burning whole cities, is a pretty futile exercise.

croes• 4 years ago

Is there such thing as weak evidence?

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

(weak)

It's actually as strong as your expectation of the evidence being there. If you are absolute sure of the evidence, look, and don't find anything, this is very strong evidence of the absence.

But well, on this case the absence is quite expected too.

2-718-281-828• 4 years ago

being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13

Doesn't that account for 3 mystery days per year? The Gregorian calendar was introduced 1582. That's not even 500 years. Makes 500y * 3d/y = 1500d is about 4.5 years.

How does this explain "about 300 missing years"?

simiones3• 4 years ago

The Julian calendar is wrong by ~1 day/128 years compared to the true solar year, not 1 day per year. So 3 days => ~390 years.

And the computation goes like this:

1. Julian calendar was created in ~45 CE.

2. Gregorian calendar was created in ~1582 CE.

3. To bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, you would have needed to subtract (1582-45) / 128 ~= 13 days. However, they only subtracted 10 days.

Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582.

Correct conclusion: they were not trying to bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, but with a later time, that of the Nicean Council in ~325 CE.

kmeisthax5• 4 years ago

For me, the thing that kills the theory for me is the idea that, in the middle of western Europe being about as politically stable and integrated as modern Afghanistan, all the warlords pillaging the country to kill each other were able to not only unanimously agree on "let's change the year to a nice round number", but were also able to coordinate this without leaving any historical records of it.

Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on it.

Now think of how many people had to cooperate to change something as simple and fundamental as the passage of recorded history. Hell, forget the fact that these were all angry, violent warlords; just think of how many scribes, monks, and bureaucrats would all have to remember to write 1000 instead of 736 whenever they wrote a date. It only takes one slip-up to reveal the fraud to archaeologists in the far future, even if they all agreed that they wanted to live in the nice round-number millennium. And nobody would be trying to protect against that because nobody would be thinking, "how do we hide this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our time crimes?"

User234• 4 years ago

Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death.

As you effectively prove, any long running conspiracy must have tools to discredit defectors. I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that if, hypothetically, some WEF flunky went on twitter and started posting about a global depopulation conspiracy, that the prestige media would either ignore or deny (“debunk”) it and any alternative sources would be smeared and delegitimized somehow.

One possible tool for discrediting tales of one’s real conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake conspiracies and then lumping them all together as nonsense.

starwind• 4 years ago

Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on it.

That's what they want you think!

dehrmann• 4 years ago

Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally

There's still a credibility issue. There are a lot of people who claim to have worked for the government and have direct knowledge of extraterrestrials. They mostly come across as crazy, but this might also be what a conspiracy looks like. Even when people expose it, they just look crazy and are easily dismissed.

t_mann• 4 years ago

Fyi, someone actually built a formal model to demonstrate that large conspiracies are probabilistically doomed to get exposed:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0127/Can-mathematics-...

However, the model makes a few simplifying assumptions, eg a single leak is sufficient to expose the conspiracy, and I think it also doesn't cover mortality. A conspiracy that wasn't exposed up until the death of all in the know would probably be considered as succesful by the model. I think it's fair to assume that the probability of getting exposed at least significantly drops at that point.

ornxka• 4 years ago

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal

blowski11• 4 years ago

The Julian Calendar would _now_ be 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. But 400 years ago, it was only 10 days behind. If only all conspiracy theories were so easy to refute.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

This lack of records led some later scholars to give the years after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable label ‘the Dark Ages’, to reflect the fact they literally couldn’t see what was going on.

That is entirely crap. They're called the dark ages because some humanists, full of themselves, started calling themselves the enlightenment and what came directly before their era "dark." Kids those days, am I right?

https://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/why-the-middle-ages-are...

blowski11• 4 years ago

It depends on who you think coined the term “dark ages”.

Protestants did indeed write of a dark age of ignorance, but that comment came 200 years after the Catholic Baronius wrote of a “lack of writers” producing a dark age.

nl2• 4 years ago

> This lack of records led some later scholars to give the years after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable label ‘the Dark Ages’,
That is entirely crap.

It's absolutely not crap.

Wikipedia says (referring the quote used in your link):

The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity. The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).

I'd emphasize the "lack of records" here. It's absolutely true to say that some scholars use that as a reason to label it the dark ages.

They're called the dark ages because some humanists, full of themselves, started calling themselves the enlightenment

I'd note that Petrarch (quoted in the link you posted!) was talking about the times he lived in himself as dark, and was far from claiming to be any sort of enlightenment.

origin_path• 4 years ago

Petrarch pretty clearly was not using the word "dark" to mean lack of information if he considered the year in which he lived to also be "dark". Did he explicitly state he was talking about abundance of historical records anywhere, or is that something that was projected onto his writings later?

Renaissance humanists were famous for considering the Roman Empire to be the peak of sophistication and all things cool. They were also famous for going to great lengths to recover supposedly lost works of Roman literature, which were often found in obscure places. It seems quite unlikely those people would have been using the word "light" to mean abundance of literature given the difficulty they had in obtaining said literature.

stackbutterflow3• 4 years ago

The "Dark Ages" is a thing in English mostly. In other languages and countries there's no such thing. It's simply the middle age or early middle age. I've noticed it affects how English speakers see this period of history.

Veen• 4 years ago

The dark ages were supposed dark in contrast to the earlier classical period, not the post-renaissance period. The enlightenment happened several centuries after the term was first used, and has nothing to do with medieval humanists.

jkingsbery• 4 years ago

As the link you provided indicates, it's a bit more complicated than that. But generally, yes, people would benefit from understanding more about Medieval History, and how our conceptions about it are shaped by Renaissance, Protestant and Enlightenment writers all used the Medieval period as a punching bag.

NiceWayToDoIT• 4 years ago

We live in very advance simulation that is optimizing in such way, so that when ever we find out it is overlord hoax - it increase historical details :D

jacquesm6• 4 years ago

Douglas Adams beat you to that one by a couple of decades.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

AlphaGeekZulu• 4 years ago

[...]You can buy a copy from all good bookshops, and also a bad one.[...]

This is brilliant!

kennywinker2• 4 years ago

One thing I know about conspiracies is it’s exceedingly hard to talk about them without spreading them. To that effect, I now believe the early medieval period is a hoax.

throwaway378037• 4 years ago

I’m not saying it was a hoax. But have you ever actually SEEN an “early medieval period”? Thought not.

kennywinker2• 4 years ago

Clearly invented by big theme restaurant to sell more dinner theatre.

Tepix3• 4 years ago

I believe that your theory is true and thus we're doomed to spread conspiracy theories ad nauseam.

abirch2• 4 years ago

Yes, I can't get the conspiracy theory that Michael Jordan was betting on basketball games, got caught, but suspending him out would have hurt basketball so he played baseball to serve out his sentence.

It doesn't make sense as he should have been banned outright but the theory has infected my brain.

wrp• 4 years ago

I sense an effect in need of a name: Any discussion of a conspiracy theory, no matter how critical, only serves to spread belief in it.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

Conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to keep people distracted from the TRUTH.

jacquesm6• 4 years ago

That's called the Winkler effect after the great conspiracy spreader of the 21st century, Kenny Winkler.

See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkler_Effect

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

A memetic hazard?

dietrichepp• 4 years ago

The “phantom time hypothesis” is a central point in one of the better Twilight Zone (1985—or 1688, depending on who you believe) episodes, called Paladin of the Lost Hour. Written by Harlan Ellison, starring Danny Kaye and Glynn Turman. In this story, precisely one hour was lost during the switch to the Gregorian calendar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_of_the_Lost_Hour

You can find it on YouTube.

verisimi2• 4 years ago

You found the lost hour on YT? Well done!!

drewzero12• 4 years ago

I've had lots of lost hours on YouTube, but not many of them (directly) involved the twilight zone.

leto_ii• 4 years ago

TLDR: yes it did, there's no phantom time; check with the Chinese, Persians, Byzantines etc.

vintermann2• 4 years ago

no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all

The author needs to become familiar with the works of Philip K. Dick. Maybe more of a religious epiphany than a conspiracy theory, but he's famous for saying "the Empire never ended".

permo-w2• 4 years ago

well it is true that there is a central power in Rome, set up by Romans, exerting huge influence across the world. whether it's accurate to describe it as an empire is another matter

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

It's not as overt as it used to be - and I don't think it's a singular empire anymore either - but there are still Powers That Be everywhere, vying for control and influence across multiple dimensions - military supremacy, economy, information, etc.

ideamotor• 4 years ago

“no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all”

Really, no Philip K Dick VALIS mention? The book that repeats “the empire never ended” and argues that much of the time between now and the was “false?”

gpderetta• 4 years ago

first thing that came to my mind as well. The missing time is also on-topic.

jrumbut• 4 years ago

Tongue firmly planted in cheek but...

There's a guy in Rome still holding one of the Roman emperors' titles, pontifex maximus (held by some of them anyway).

Meanwhile, there’s a powerful army marching all over the world with an eagle standard and a commander-in-chief who recognizes the Roman guy's authority in some matters but not others. He's trying to deal with rising food and oil prices while organizing resistance to an invader from the east and warding off a domestic usurper.

When did the Roman empire fall again?

Perceval• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/publicanthony/status/1542922977481728000

Finnucane• 4 years ago

Clearly this guy has not seen the pink beam of light.

bpiche• 4 years ago

When I read it it didn’t seem like it argued that the time between now and then was ‘false’. VALIS argues that the time and events between now and then are constantly being ‘laminated’ (PKD’s term) onto the long now. Iirc Horselover Fat develops the ability to see the layers of history laminated onto the present and concludes that the Empire never ended. Caveat lector, I haven’t read the other two books in the VALIS trilogy.

x86x87• 4 years ago

PKD does not argue that the actual roman empire did not fell. It's most around the idea of the empire and the existence of an entity that continuously makes our life miserable. Keeping us closed in a metaphorical black iron prison. From that POV the empire never ended - even worse: nowadays we have multiple flavours of it.

corsac2• 4 years ago

It takes a bunch of ‘facts’ – some of which are accurate but entirely explicable, some of which are just plain wrong – and knits them together into an ostensibly compelling narrative.

I feel a need to add that conspiracy theorists deserve no grudging credit for "ingeniously" pulling this off, any more than sociopaths deserve credit for "ingeniously" manipulating people. With little enough intellectual integrity, any dope can do it.

As an off-topic aside, did you know that the Wuchang Uprising (a key 1911 anti-Qing rebellion in Wuhan) had a coronavirus on its flag?[0] It's worth asking why the media never reported on it, and what shadowy Tongmenghui revolutionaries are behind the events of the past few years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#/media/File:C...

headsoup• 4 years ago

If we find out that one of the lab technicians in Wuhan that handled the viruses was a blood descendant of the Wuchang, well... :D

JPLeRouzic• 4 years ago

A few years ago I took biology courses at the local university. One emeritus professor told us that nothing happened in medicine between antiquity and the 1500' when smart guys (from his French hometown) taught the world the marvels of anatomy.

I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and Iranian regions during that time, he replied: Nothing significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam...

willis936• 4 years ago

The simple narrative taught in every history class is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist.

https://youtu.be/oDQXFNWuZj8

mtmail• 4 years ago

Video shows a comedian playing piano and singing to a sock. Am I missing an important point?

honkdaddy• 4 years ago

I've always wondered what narrative Bo is actually referring to here, I feel like the joke's maybe 25 years too late.

What's the classist big lie that kids are learning these days? I'm sure it varies around the nation, but the history I see young people learning now is generally pretty reconciliatory and balanced. Kids aren't learning "Columbus discovered America and had Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock with the Indians" anymore, I like to think children's history education's grown some nuance since Bo went to school in the 90s.

throw0101a3• 4 years ago

I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and Iranian regions during that time, he replied: Nothing significant.

If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it really matter?

There were many curious minds that made useful discoveries, but by ~1200 CE the general zeitgeist was to discourage scientific inquiries:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...

Further, I don't think there was a 'critical mass' of people exploring and exchanging ideas (either because of a too-small population, or difficulties in communication), and so if you did just happen to make discoveries… there was no one to tell, and your book simply languished on a shelf somewhere unnoticed, as from your link:

Ibn al-Nafis discovered that the blood in the right ventricle of the heart is instead carried to the left by way of the lungs.[70] This discovery was one of the first descriptions of the pulmonary circulation,[70] although his writings on the subject were only rediscovered in the 20th century,[71] and it was William Harvey's later independent discovery which brought it to general attention.[72]

If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it really matter?

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

If a tree in falls in the forest, and no hears it, does it really matter?

But people DID hear it, just not in big parts of Europe where most of "our" history is taught / comes from. It's very eurocentric to assume that just because "we" didn't hear about it, it didn't exist. Civilization was miles ahead outside of Europe for a long time.

mrwnmonm5• 4 years ago

My God, some things never die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_YDx2mtF0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0rXaQzc0KA

blowski11• 4 years ago

If a tree falls in the forest, but no Europeans / Christians heard it, does it really matter?

Yes. Yes it does.

tick_tock_tick• 4 years ago

That's harsh, I don't know much on the subject but I assume Wikipedia is missing a lot or at-least glosses over it? It almost seems impossible they'd have accomplished so little in that field.

mrwnmonm5• 4 years ago

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18822953/

kspacewalk22• 4 years ago

What else of that calibre?

kspacewalk22• 4 years ago

I asked what he thought of what happened in the Arabic and Iranian regions during that time, he replied: Nothing significant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam...

I mean... based on that article alone, that seems to be substantially true, if overly harsh? Half of it are "discoveries" which were lost or disregarded and had to be "re-discovered", and IMO those are not discoveries at all since they change or affect nothing. The Book of Optics seems to be the only notable exception in that contributions section.

belugacat• 4 years ago

substantially true, if overly harsh

That tracks with the professor being French.

ineedasername• 4 years ago

There is a difference to be made between specific discoveries and overall progress as a world civilization.

It seems strange to say that nothing was discovered simply because it didn't have a lasting impact. It may be accurate to say the Western world hadn't discovered it, or learned of that discover by others, or that the discovery was lost, but not that it wasn't actually discovered.

It's the pinnacle of "Not Invented Here"

Discovery and influence or impact simply aren't the same things.

gilleain2• 4 years ago

How were they lost or rediscovered?

"Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Latinized: Rhazes) (born 865) was one of the most versatile scientists of the Islamic Golden Age ... Many of his books were translated into Latin, and he remained one of the undisputed authorities in European medicine well into the 17th century."

"Ibn Sina, more commonly known in west as Avicenna was a Persian polymath and physician of the tenth and eleventh centuries. He was known for his scientific works, but especially his writing on medicine."

"Ibn Buṭlān, ... was an Arab physician who was active in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.[64] He is known as an author of the Taqwim al-Sihhah (The Maintenance of Health تقويم الصحة), in the West, best known under its Latinized translation, Tacuinum Sanitatis (sometimes Taccuinum Sanitatis)."

More than this, a lot of the scholarship in the Islamic world preserved discoveries by the Greeks:

"Galen is one of the most famous scholars and physicians of classical antiquity. Today, the original texts of some of his works, and details of his biography, are lost, and are only known to us because they were translated into Arabic"

Or did the Greeks not 'actually' discover anything, either?

tshaddox• 4 years ago

Half of it are "discoveries" which were lost or disregarded and had to be "re-discovered", and IMO those are not discoveries at all since they change or affect nothing.

Surely the relevant consideration should be how much the discovery affected people at the time, not whether the discovery was eventually lost and needed to be re-discovered. Consider that all discoveries we have made could eventually be lost. It certainly doesn't diminish the historical significance of the discovery of penicillin if that discovery is lost in the population bottleneck caused by the 2095 A.I. War and only re-discovered 100 years after that.

ch4s3• 4 years ago

This seems incorrect. The idea of pharmacology as a separate discipline and profession comes from the Islamic golden age[1]. Optics lead to the microscope, so that’s pretty big. The work in translating and preserving Greek medical works was mostly undertaken during the Islamic golden age. The Ottomans pioneered clean water as a source of health and the regulation of medicine as a profession.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5723183/#:~:tex....

chx• 4 years ago

for example, a coalition of rulers around the turn of the second millennium – Pope Sylvester II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Byzantine Emperor Constantine V, say – who conspired to fix the calendar

Aside from the nations the author already mentioned we have the Korchak culture (sixth and seventh century) and later the Szeligi culture (situated in roughly present day Ukraine and Poland, respectively) and faking an archeological culture is fairly impossible even today. Yes there were quite a few others in the "early Slavs" era and area but I mention these two because of the amount of findings we have for them.

FeepingCreature• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Scott's The Pyramid and the Garden https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga... , about how many bits of freedom you need to get a conspiracy theory like the Pyramid of Giza encoding the speed of light.

erdaniels• 4 years ago

So kind of like going from version 4 to 6

Joker_vD• 4 years ago

Ha, amateurs. Look at the work of a professional (that is, he made it his source of income) conspiracy theorist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)

Semiapies2• 4 years ago

Beat me to it; the New Chronology is wonderfully bonkers.

NoGravitas5• 4 years ago

Related, but Tartaria is another fun rabbit hole to wander down.

golergka3• 4 years ago

He is actually a quite well-known and professional mathematician. Too bad it's not what he's known for anymore.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

The conspiracy theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".

Sounds like he just played too much eu4.

stackbutterflow3• 4 years ago

That's actually what I thought the article was about. Odd that there wasn't any mention of it.

andrewla• 4 years ago

Some of the New Chronology is delightfully whacky. In particular I love the idea of historical events documented by independent sources result in appearing to be two or more events that cause the timeline to be expanded. One example is that Suleiman the Magnificent and Solomon were the same person, just documented from two different perspectives. And thus the Hagia Sofia and Solomon's Temple are the same building.

His criticisms of radiocarbon dating are interesting (while not completely supportive of his hypothesis). But it is an interesting rabbit hole to dig into; the relationship between radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, and the attempt to get an accurate historical record of carbon isotopic composition over the last couple of thousand years is a surprisingly difficult problem, and in many cases has circular dependencies on known ages of artifacts.

mike_hearn2• 4 years ago

Yeah, this stuff is whacky but really fun to read about. Even though most of it is surely wrong it leads to all sorts of fascinating rabbit holes.

I wrote a three part series where I summarize some of the more interesting pseudo-history theories that are out there:

https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-1-...

https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-2-...

https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-3-...

PTH doesn't really make an appearance because it's actually one of the less interesting theories. I don't believe these, but the facts the authors bring up to argue for their position are always interesting to learn about. Part 3 discusses some of the issues with 'scientific' dating methods and covers the circularity problem you discuss.

dncornholio• 4 years ago

I reckon there were people who lived under different empires and kings, who did not notice one thing.

stillsut• 4 years ago

Could we find a tree we know was planted in say 300 AD, then count the tree rings in its trunk? Or some kind of river that floods yearly and leaves a discrete layer of sediment?

mcguire4• 4 years ago

That's dendrochronology, and it is used to date wooden objects. The problems are that you only get an age (the tree was N years old at the time this object was created), and that you only get a slice of the tree (you can only see the subset of rings that are visible in the wooden beam supporting the house).

You can compare ring widths, assuming you have wood from the same climatic area, and use that as a standard candle to date objects reasonably well.

samatman4• 4 years ago

no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all

"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement [...] Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus [...] thereby it becomes its enemies [...] the Empire never ended." —Philip K. Dick aka Horselover Fat

Seriously, if the author is into weird conspiratorial thinking, the late work of PKD is a must.

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

This is one of my favorite stupid conspiracies and one that a lot of people havnt heard of.

RivieraKid4• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks that the "ethics" part of philosophy is kind of trivial? The only part of philosophy which took me a long time to form a clear opinion on was the hard problem of consciousness and related topics.

golergka3• 4 years ago

You're definitely not the only one, but most people who share this opinion didn't study ethics well enough. Its a field full of complicated contradictions.

acoard• 4 years ago

As a philosophy major who was never particularly interested in ethics, I certainly don't think it's trivial. If you trivial as in "clearly obvious" then I certainly disagree. But let me try and charitably interpret your position.

I do think that in practice the different ethical systems don't produce wildly different outcomes, from utilitarianism to deontology to even virtue ethics. Of course, in the realm of thought experiments they can be widely different. But in the real world, the hardest thing is to be moral (i.e. do the right thing) rather than defining your ethics (having a clear code). In practice, the "evil"/conflict/strive in the world I see is due to selfishness or amorality, not disagreements between utilitarians and kantians. Is this what you're getting at? That the distinctions between the different ethical systems collapse into similar practical situations? That being a "good person" is more important than the particular ethical code you follow? (That's my take, basically).

I'll also say that I found meta-ethics incredibly illuminating. It essentially builds up a language to discuss different ethical systems and makes conversations around them way easier.

Big up on consciousness and philosophy of mind though. I also found philosophy of science fascinating. And shoutout to Hobbes! He would have loved HN, he was such a contrarian.

RivieraKid4• 4 years ago

My main point is that ethics is subjective, there's no correct answer to ethical problems, it boils down to how people feel. See also my other comment.

I absolutely agree that in the real world it's mainly about being a good person, not about being a particular type of a good person.

charles_f2• 4 years ago

There is a lot to it in the grey area. Don't kill, don't steal, don't cheat, don't eat baby seals, don't touch my grandma, that is trivial. The complex bit is for everything that's less of a drastic decision.

Is it ethical to let a coworker make a mistake you saw so they can learn, at the cost of project progress, or is it ethical to help them and make sure you deliver what was promised to your stakeholders on time? What if you don't like the co-worker? What if you dont like stakeholders?

Is it ethical to slack off at work if you need that for your mental safety? Or is it theft?

And so on. Tons of little decisions that are not about life and death, but still very much about ethics, and that are not trivial at all.

RivieraKid4• 4 years ago

My view is that ethics is subjective, it boils down to how people feel. They often have various ethical systems and rules built on those feelings (or on axioms which feel right).

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

You are in luck: there is no problem of consciousness.

charles_f2• 4 years ago

It only works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the decline of Rome left a nasty gap in the records. Elsewhere – in Tang China, Abbasid Persia and in the rest of the Islamic world, which only developed in the seventh century – history continued apace.

Sounds to me like Europe moved at a relativistically faster speed than the rest of the world which accounts for the missing time. People in the 1500s just didn't have the tools to explain it yet.

bsedlm• 4 years ago

no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere under Rome. Which is a pity, because that would be brilliant.

it's mere occulted knowledge. Philip K. Dick says so in his exegesis. "the empire never ended"

additionally, the empire, which could also be regarded as an ideology or even an instutional tradition of hiding knowledge (to construct authority and wield it as power) has a deeply ingrained habit of erasing and rewriting history

to the point that this author is doing the bidding of this occulted (and possibly nonexistent) cult of occulting (i.e. hiding and mystery making) ideological/institutional force; he's rationalizing and backing the claim "conspiracies are silly nonesense, mkay? nothing to see but fools and buffoons".

midislack• 4 years ago

Conspiracy theories like this are great fun. They also cause certain people to pop out of the woodwork and reveal themselves in interesting ways. If you’re fishing for certain kinds of deep sea critters there is no better bait.

brundolf• 4 years ago

I have to think part of what makes conspiracy theories take off is that they're fun. This one was so much fun to think about, that we could've been so wrong about something so big, that it was right under our noses

Not unlike creepypasta; injecting some mystery and wonder into what can otherwise be a bland, even bleak world, where it feels like everything's been explained away already

verisimi2• 4 years ago

What if those authorities were wrong? What if they were lying, even? Can we be sure? Can we ever truly know?
Well: yes, we can. The Phantom Time Hypothesis is nonsense.

Hmm. I disagree that we can know. We might hypothesise that this is the case, we might evaluate some evidence to better than other evidence. But "knowing" is hard - we can only know very few things.

In my view, we can only say we know those facts in the world that we have personally experienced. The rest is hearsay. If you read something from a book, or even several books, or even a TV program, none of those can confirm the truth of a fact.

retrac• 4 years ago

Slightly related, correlating different ancient calendars that weren't ever explicitly lined up at the time in historical records is a delightful, if esoteric topic. While there may not be any missing time from recent European history, it's a lot hazier if you go even further back.

For example, Mesopotamia laid dead for 3000 years before being rediscovered. Their civilizations were long gone when the Greeks and Romans started leaving written texts. Akkad and Sumeria were rediscovered anew in the early 20th century, even more completely anew than Ancient Egypt had been a century before that. Along with that came uncertainty of the dates and calendars. Even today, we are still not sure of the dating of Old Babylon, let alone the first cities of Sumeria another thousand years before that. Today there are three competing interpretations, attempts to to align the day-by-day written records (often not overlapping from varying locations) with a constant chronology. Was Hammurabi born in 1810 BC, 1760 BC, 1830 BC? We have exact dates given for when he did things. But we don't know what those refer to! Similar ambiguities exist for Ancient Egypt. [1]

That's not the case with the Mayan long calendar! They were diligent astronomers, more so than the Babylonians, if we go by what records they left of observed events. The body of evidence over the last ~30 years has mounted to become nearly irrefutable. There's only one possible concordance that fits, and it fits the date exactly. To the point it's safe to say it's historical fact that Pakal the Great was born 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahaw 13 Pop (19 March 603 AD), acceded to the throne 9.9.2.4.8 5 Lamat 1 Mol (26 July 615) and died 9.12.11.5.18 6 Etzʼnab 11 Yax (26 August 683).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_ancient_Near...

mynameismonkey• 4 years ago

no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere under Rome. Which is a pity, because that would be brilliant.

The Empire Never Ended:

https://1library.net/article/empire-ended-philosophy-science...

age_bronze• 4 years ago

Here's a real historical inconsistency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_years_%28Jewish_calend...

I dislike the framing of some inconsistencies as "conspiracy theory". Mistakes can and will happen, it's an argument of emotion to frame an inconsistency as a "conspiracy theory". Just because one possible explanation is that people colluded intentionally and conspiratorially doesn't rule out all the other more plausible explanations that something really is wrong.

It's also bad epistemology. Literally everything can be explained as a conspiracy, so the fact the the only explanation you can think of to an inconsistency is "people colluded" reflect more on you than on the problem. Historical records can and will be inaccurate.

Some people's epistemological metric goes haywire from those two words. People write inaccurate stuff all the time. It's literally just papers. Other civilizations are other clocks and there are very few historical evidence to synchronize those clocks, especially when the travel time of news and people in those times was extremely slow. Lack of international news also means loss of synchronization.

If the invocation of the words "conspiracy theory" in any way repels you from exploring inconsistencies with an open mind, the problem is with your emotional reasoning. If you believe this guy, something like the missing years could never have happened. It clearly happened, and I am sure there was no conspiracy behind it. Two words, "conspiracy theory", entirely shifted your internal model of the world emotionally, when epistemologically, it shouldn't change your opinion into either direction. The existence of an extremely unlikely explanation is completely equivalent to just no explanation. "Conspiracy theory" is purely an appeal to emotion. Someone claimed A, and a guy told you Conspiracy=>A therefore ~A. Only an emotional human would process this useless information in any way.

gxt• 4 years ago

We should just do a clean slate and say this year is 12775. 1. Accept AUC at face value with its potential mistakes as the most factual and secular year numbering scheme that goes back the furthest and with which we have the highest confidence that history has been written with. 2. Accept the AD year count since the last consuls at face value for easy compatibility with the iso calendar. 3. Merge the valuable contribution from the Holocene calendar.

schemathings• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the F Scott Fitzgerald story - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz except instead of 3 centuries hiding, it's 5 acres with a big diamond :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_as_Big_as_the_Ritz

Did the early medieval era ever take place?

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