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Books So Bad They're Good: In Search of Lost Time [1]
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Date: 2022-08-20
As ridiculous as this sounds, there have been several Very Serious Books by Very Serious Academically-Trained scholars who claim that calendar experts were anything but. Although their calculations all differ somewhat, they all agree that what we have all been brainwashed to think of as the historical record is actually a forgery produced to cover up the errors of the past. These individuals, virtually all of whom come from either Eastern or Central Europe, call themselves “chronology critics,” and despite zero evidence and unanimous gut-busting laughter from the scholarly community, this small but fervent group has produced a surprisingly large of number of ludicrously stupid books, very few of which have been translated into English, thank God and the angels.
I’m not going to discuss every chronological critic or their books tonight — even I have my limits — but here are a few prime examples:
Die Offenbarung Johannis: Eine astronimisch-historische Untersuchung (The Revelation of John: An Astronomical-Historical Investigation), by Nikolai Morozov — Nikolai Morozov lived an exceptionally colorful life. Revolutionary, chemistry teacher, member of the Duma, Biblical scholar, aeronautics pioneer — it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do if he put his mind to it. He even joined the Red Army as a sniper during the Great Patriotic War, and racked up an impressive record despite poor eyesight and advanced age. Why no one has produced a film, or at least a highly romanticized anime, about him is a good question, because if ever there was a man who deserved it, it’s him.
Alas for his reputation, Morozov also wrote this book, which makes the average tome by Zecharia Sitchin look like something out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Trained Hebraicist he might have been, but Die Offenbarung Johannis, written in 1907 in between all his other activities, he claimed that the final book of the Bible, The Revelation of John, was not a satire/complaint against Emperor Nero like pretty much the rest of the scholarly community believes. Oh no, Morozov, using a highly sophisticated set of mathematical calculations that had absolutely no relevance to the actual text, claimed the following:
Revelation describes not a series of imaginary occurrence, but an actual astronomical event that took place on September 30, 395.
Since there was no way that the Apostle John could possibly be alive on September 30, 395, that meant someone else wrote Revelation.
That someone was another John entire: St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and future Doctor of the Church.
The fact that Revelation predated St. John’s bishopric (and birth) by several hundred years did not seem to make a difference to Morozov or his followers, who included one Anatoly Fomenko (see below, and please, do not eat or drink when reading the section about him). It certainly would make for a fine chapter or two in that hypothetical anime, though, or possibly a thriller by Tim Powers or the late John M. Ford.
Das erfundene Mittelalter: Die grösste Zeitfälschung der Geschichte (The Fake Middle Ages: The Greatest Time Hoax in History), by Heribert Illig — Did you know that the reign of Charlemagne never happened? That the accepted chronology of ancient Egypt is a total fraud? That radiocarbon dating and tree ring analysis are worthless when it comes to determining anything about the past? Or that a publicist who believes the “Comet Venus” theories propounded by the late, great, and scientifically illiterate Immanuel Velikovsky were 100% correct has applied this forbidden knowledge to prove all of the above?
No? Then let me introduce you to Heribert Illig and his disciples, Gunnar Heinsohn and Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, who have come up with a theory that is so...unusual...that it goes a long way to ruin Germany’s well-deserved reputation for scholarly accuracy and precision.
Illig, the aforesaid publicist who has somehow convinced his followers that he’s actually a historian (spoiler: he isn’t), began as a devotee of Immanuel Velikovsky, the pseudo-scientist who achieved inexplicable popularity in the 1950’s thanks to glowing reviews by New York literati who absolutely should have known better. His other formative influence was the Nazi-era “historian” Wilhelm Kammeier, a slightly unhinged schoolteacher who was convinced that he could prove that not one, not two, not even three, but all medieval manuscripts were forgeries perpetrated by a rotating cast of humanists determined to downplay the contributions of Aryans Germans to European history and culture.
Now, not only is this idea ridiculous on the face of it, it’s also (surprise!) horribly racist, as one might expect given the times. That did not prevent Illig from propounding what he called the Phantom Time Hypothesis, which posits the following:
There are very few archaeological artifacts from the 7th through 10th centuries (wrong).
That Romanesque buildings are not copies of Roman buildings or inspired by Roman buildings, but actual, genuine, for-real Roman buildings even though the Western Empire ended in the 5th century with the deposition of the hilarious named “Romulus Augustulus” (extremely wrong).
That carbon-14 dating, dendochronology, and other standard dating methods are inaccurate (so wrong it makes my sinuses hurt).
That medievalists rely entirely on written sources, which are all misdated and wrong, so they need to shut up and learn a trade, or something (swallows four ibuprofens, dry).
That the Gregorian calendar, allegedly off by ten days when Pope Gregory XIII decided to reconcile the natural calendar with the Church calendar, should have been off by thirteen days, and that this error means that the modern calendar is off by not by three days but by 297 years (BWAHAHAHAAHAAH!!!!!!)
All of the above led Illig to the conclusion that once historians realized that the Pope’s talentless hacks had suddenly introduced nearly three centuries into the records, they promptly faked the entire history of what modern scholars call The Dark Ages, including creating a fictitious character named “Charles the Great,” aka Charlemagne, to dominate the non-existent time that Pope Gregory’s incompetent minions had introduced into the otherwise straightforward Julian calendar (*makes incoherent peeping noises and clutches Gil the Wonder Cat so hard he squeaks*).
If that weren’t enough, Heinsohn promptly claimed that analysis of Carolingian and Ottonian coins confirmed all of this, that is when he wasn’t trying to prove that the Sumerians never existed, which is certainly news to a great many archaeologists and museum curators….
New Methods of Statistical Analysis of Historical Texts: Applications to Chronology, by Anatoly Fomenko — this book, and several sequels, were printed by the niche publisher Edwin Mellen Press. Just why they did so isn’t clear — Mellen’s founder, Herbert Richardson, was eccentric but far from stupid — but it’s possible that Fomenko, a respected mathematician in his native Russia, made his pitch plausible enough to pass muster. Either way, this book and its sequels propound a hypothesis so nutty that it’s a wonder every squirrel in North America hasn’t broken into the publisher’s warehouse for a nice light snack.
You think I jest? Fomenko, who seems determined to out-Morozov Morozov, claims the following:
That statistical analysis demonstrates that virtually everything we know about history is false because the same stories were told about numerous historical figures and ruling families over a very long period of time, and never mind the possibility that a) humans tend to behave in certain ways regardless of epoch, ancestry, or ethnicity, b) legends about folk heroes tend to follow certain patterns, and c) some of these allegedly suspicious parallels might have been deliberate (see: Napoleon deliberately modeling himself on a Roman emperor).
This in turn means that all of supposedly ancient history is actually a deliberate reworking of the European Middle Ages, and never mind all the archaeological records from several thousand years before that, each and every one of which is either misdated or outright forged.
That Claudius Ptolemy, author of the pre-Copernican cosmology known as The Almagest, wrote it not in the early years of the Common Era, but in the alleged year 1000.
This in turn means that Jesus of Nazareth lived not in what we now call the first century CE, but in the twelfth century (?). Even better, Fomenko also believes that Jesus was crucified not in Jerusalem, but in what is now Istanbul (??????).
It also means that the Trojan War and the Crusades were the same event, and don’t even try to figure that one out unless you want to rupture something.
Genghis Khan and his Mongols were not in fact Asian, but Russian (*cues up Mr. Chekov joke*).
Oh yeah, the West Coast and the Great Plains of North America were part of a Siberian-American Empire that lasted until 1775, and never mind that this area was (and still is) occupied by literally millions of indigenous people who had no idea that they were subjects of the Tsars.
That this theory is dismissed by, well, pretty much every single historian, scientist, and scholar in the world does not seem to impress Fomenko and his disciples. The math proves that they’re right, yessirree, no question, and anyone who disputes this simply isn’t looking at the equations the correct way. So there!
Anyone who thinks that these fine pseudo-historians are alone in their lunacy, well, guess again. There are at least half a dozen other Chronological Critics I could have profiled tonight, with claims that everything from the Ice Age to the Big Bang was misdated. It’s enough to make an actual historian sob hysterically into their beverage of choice for a very, very, very long time.
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Have you ever heard of Phantom Time? Anatoly Fomenko? Wilhelm Kammeir? Heribert Illig? Is there a copy of anything from the Edwin Mellen Press on the shelves of your knotty pine rumpus room? Would you admit to read any of these books? Did you ever watch Star Trek and wonder how Mr. Spock avoided shoving Ensign Chekov out the airlock after yet another claim that something invented by Vulcan/Tellarites/Andorians/etc. actually was Russian? It’s a warm summer night here at the Last Homely Shack, so gather round the bug zapper and share….
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