50 ms·
Did the early medieval era ever take place?
- lukeqsee 4y agoClever 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.
- blowski 4y agoFoucault’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.
- tsimionescu 4y agoOne 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 4y agoAw man, this should have had a spoiler warning. Could be a good feature for HN.
- InitialLastName 4y agoSave 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.
- blowski 4y agoThe Illuminatus trilogy is pretty avant garde in style, whereas Foucault's Pendulum is fairly standard prose. Really depends on what type of book you want.
- InitialLastName 4y agoYes, and Foucault's pendulum is very literary research oriented (long expositions of guys surfing their zettelkasten), where Dan Brown's books are standard pop fiction action fare. Every 15 years or so, we get a new, more popularly approachable entry in the "Templars/Illuminati are real" mystery thriller genre. We're about due another one, but I'll bet I missed it because it's in the Young Adult Fiction section.
- corsac 4y 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 4y agoCool movie idea.
- kochikame 4y agoWell, 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 4y 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-by-climate-change-in-near-future/ https://nypost.com/2020/11/11/great-tits-could-be-wiped-out-... (first line: We mean the birds, dirtbags.)
- permo-w 4y agothe Victorians could have made a fairly safe bet that they were living in the era of Victoria
- NoGravitas 4y agoImagine 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 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#Etymology
- int_19h 4y agoFor 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/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/
- toast0 4y agoTime began January 1, 1970 UTC. Anything before then didn't really happen.
- blowski 4y agoAnd will end 19 January 2038 03:14:07 UTC.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIf there is nothing outside that range, then what do you do with 0x80000000? Reject it outright?
- blowski 4y agoSend it to the very fires of hell from whence it came. Or use 64 bits to store timestamps.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWell, 64 bit timestamps also have that number...
- Tepix 4y agoWhich number? 2038? Because that's what you are replying to.
- Dylan16807 4y ago0x80000000, the number I asked what to do about, if it's neither in the past nor in the future (along with all other numbers between it and 0xFFFFFFFF). 0x80000000 is the number they said to send to hell "or" use 64 bits to store. But storing it in 64 bits still leaves you with the same number waiting for interpretation. (Possibly two numbers depending on sign extension settings.) So do you still need to send it to hell, or what happens differently?
- antognini 4y agoThe 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 4y agoThis. 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.
- prox 4y agoI have always found the history around the Holy Roman Emperor interesting, with prince electors : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor 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.
- tomatocracy 4y agoI 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.
- blowski 4y agoThe 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 4y 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-called-the-dark-ages/ https://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/why-the-middle-ages-are...
- blowski 4y agoIt 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.
- nl 4y 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 4y agoPetrarch 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.
- NiceWayToDoIT 4y agoWe 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
- jacquesm 4y agoDouglas 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 4y ago[...]You can buy a copy from all good bookshops, and also a bad one.[...] This is brilliant!
- kennywinker 4y agoOne 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.
- Tepix 4y agoI believe that your theory is true and thus we're doomed to spread conspiracy theories ad nauseam.
- abirch 4y agoYes, 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.
- throwaway378037 4y agoI’m not saying it was a hoax. But have you ever actually SEEN an “early medieval period”? Thought not.
- kennywinker 4y agoClearly invented by big theme restaurant to sell more dinner theatre.
- rendall 4y agoThose of us in the know call this powerful, shadowy cabal Big Theme Resta.
- optimalsolver 4y agoCable Guy flashbacks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dietrichepp 4y agoThe “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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_of_the_Lost_Hour You can find it on YouTube.
- leto_ii 4y agoTLDR: yes it did, there's no phantom time; check with the Chinese, Persians, Byzantines etc.
- vintermann 4y 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-w 4y agowell 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_ 4y agoIt'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.
- indigochill 4y agoBut that's been going on since at least ancient Egypt so we might as well say the Egyptian Empire never ended if that's your standard.
- throwaway_4747 4y agoWell technically not the Egyptians, but they were a huge part of it in their culture. All one needs to do is look into Mystery Babylon and the Illumined ones. Very deep rabbit hole and is very interesting to learn about.
- vintermann 4y agoI think Philip K. Dick would have been quite OK with the suggestion that the Empire which never ended was also the Egyptian one.
- ideamotor 4y 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?” See also: https://philipdick.com/resources/miscellaneous/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick-by-r-crumb-from-weirdo-17/ https://philipdick.com/resources/miscellaneous/the-religious....
- gpderetta 4y agofirst thing that came to my mind as well. The missing time is also on-topic.
- jrumbut 4y agoTongue 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 4y agohttps://twitter.com/publicanthony/status/1542922977481728000 https://twitter.com/publicanthony/status/1542922977481728000
- Finnucane 4y agoClearly this guy has not seen the pink beam of light.
- bpiche 4y agoWhen 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.
- corsac 4y 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:Chinese-army_Wuhan_flag_(1911-1928)_19_dots.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#/media/File:C...
- headsoup 4y agoIf 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 4y agoA 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_Islamic_world#Medical_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Islam...
- willis936 4y agoThe simple narrative taught in every history class is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist. https://youtu.be/oDQXFNWuZj8 https://youtu.be/oDQXFNWuZj8
- mtmail 4y agoVideo shows a comedian playing piano and singing to a sock. Am I missing an important point?
- aaaronic 4y agoBut the sock puppet sings exactly the quoted line...
- honkdaddy 4y agoI'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.
- throw0101a 4y 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_Philosophers 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?
- chx 4y 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 4y agoReminds me of Scott's The Pyramid and the Garden https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/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 4y agoSo kind of like going from version 4 to 6
- Joker_vD 4y agoHa, 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
- Semiapies 4y agoBeat me to it; the New Chronology is wonderfully bonkers.
- NoGravitas 4y agoRelated, but Tartaria is another fun rabbit hole to wander down.
- Semiapies 4y agoOh, wow. That is...a Hell of a thing. Thanks for the tip!
- golergka 4y agoHe is actually a quite well-known and professional mathematician. Too bad it's not what he's known for anymore.
- the_only_law 4y 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.
- stackbutterflow 4y agoThat's actually what I thought the article was about. Odd that there wasn't any mention of it.
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- dncornholio 4y agoI reckon there were people who lived under different empires and kings, who did not notice one thing.
- aaron695 4y ago
- stillsut 4y agoCould 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?
- mcguire 4y agoThat'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.
- samatman 4y 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 4y agoThis is one of my favorite stupid conspiracies and one that a lot of people havnt heard of.
- RivieraKid 4y agoAm 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.
- golergka 4y agoYou'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 4y agoAs 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.
- RivieraKid 4y agoMy 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_f 4y 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 4y 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 4y agoConspiracy 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 4y agoI 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
- verisimi 4y 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 4y agoSlightly 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_East#Variant_Middle_Bronze_Age_chronologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_ancient_Near...
- mynameismonkey 4y 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-fiction-henri-bergson-fabulati.zxoxml4z https://1library.net/article/empire-ended-philosophy-science...
- age_bronze 4y agoHere's a real historical inconsistency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_years_%28Jewish_calendar%29 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 4y agoWe 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.
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- schemathings 4y agoReminds 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_as_Big_as_the_Ritz