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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 reg

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 4y 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.
prox 4y ago
I 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 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.
  - simiones 4y ago
    It's also fun to note that one of the first leaders of the Russian empire married one of the last Byzantine princesses - thus taking the title of Caesar (Tsar).
    - neaden 4y ago
      Yeah Moscow sometimes referred to as Third Rome by people who view it as the continuation. The Holy Roman Empire would have of course differed as the Kaiser (also Caesar derived) similarly counted himself as the continuation of the Roman Empire.
    - vt85 4y ago
      And since when Tsar is Byzantine title? :)))
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Tsar is a contraction of Caesar as pronounced in Slavic languages. The corresponding Byzantine title was Basileus, and while the word itself is unrelated, the title correspondence was very well established at the time (much like the use of "emperor" for Chinese and Japanese rulers, even though the titles in those languages are not etymologically related, either).
        vt85 4y ago
  - JadeNB 4y 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. The Ottomans themselves thought of and described themselves this way.
- bhaak 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
  - ginko 4y ago
    Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      China also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible. I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
      - vkazanov 4y ago
        Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        On the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.
      - SZJX 4y ago
        It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.
jack_pp 4y ago
Absence of evidence actually is (weak) evidence of absence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of-evidence-is-evidence-of-absence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of...
- alxlaz 4y 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.
  - groffee 4y ago
    > There are fewer written records in the traditional sense But still more written than you could ever hope to read in your lifetime.
  - blindmute 4y ago
    You're ignoring the method by which these things are dated. First, if a date was written on the page (extremely rare), it may well have been after the date change happened. The vast majority of writings from the time are dated to known events, like eclipses, or by reference to other known things ("20 years ago, when Joe was born" and then finding Joe's birth records). If calendars really did advance 300 years, we are living past the advance. That means that when we see a writing reference an eclipse that we know happened in what we call 900, it doesn't actually tell us anything about the calendar having moved or not. It only tells us that something was observed 1122 years ago. That could be 900 years after 0AD, or it could be 600. Actually, almost every instance of dating anything back then depends upon few relative date calculations which are "known". The eclipse happened 1000 years ago, so that is year 1022, and this writing referencing it is from 1022, and so this scholar writing a generation later is from 1082. This inscribed rock was found under 1100 years of dust, so the people living here were from 922, and their language existed at that time, and all records we find from this civilization are now known to be from the early 900s. Now we can claim to have evidence that there was thriving commerce in the 900s with hundreds of written records about it, so of course the dates weren't changed. If you dig into the records people cite as evidence against the phantom time hypothesis, the vast majority of them (literally every one that I've seen) is using indirect dating in this way, which doesn't mean anything.
2-718-281-828 4y 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"?
- simiones 4y 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.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    > Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. I read the whole article and I did not understand this part describing the premise of the conspiracy. Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?
    - simiones 4y ago
      No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige value, without recording this decision anywhere. Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically slightly more plausible in a time before centralized calendars and computing). Later historians simply took the official date for granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The real date was reflected in their astronomical calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of a 13-day one. Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed in the article, and others.
kmeisthax 4y 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?"
- User23 4y 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.

Archelaos 4y 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.

prox 4y ago

I 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 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.
- simiones 4y ago
  It's also fun to note that one of the first leaders of the Russian empire married one of the last Byzantine princesses - thus taking the title of Caesar (Tsar).
  - neaden 4y ago
    Yeah Moscow sometimes referred to as Third Rome by people who view it as the continuation. The Holy Roman Empire would have of course differed as the Kaiser (also Caesar derived) similarly counted himself as the continuation of the Roman Empire.
  - vt85 4y ago
    And since when Tsar is Byzantine title? :)))
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Tsar is a contraction of Caesar as pronounced in Slavic languages. The corresponding Byzantine title was Basileus, and while the word itself is unrelated, the title correspondence was very well established at the time (much like the use of "emperor" for Chinese and Japanese rulers, even though the titles in those languages are not etymologically related, either).
      - vt85 4y ago
- JadeNB 4y 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. The Ottomans themselves thought of and described themselves this way.
bhaak 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
- ginko 4y ago
  Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    China also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible. I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
    - vkazanov 4y ago
      Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        On the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.
    - SZJX 4y ago
      It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.

jack_pp 4y ago

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

alxlaz 4y 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.
- groffee 4y ago
  > There are fewer written records in the traditional sense But still more written than you could ever hope to read in your lifetime.
- blindmute 4y ago
  You're ignoring the method by which these things are dated. First, if a date was written on the page (extremely rare), it may well have been after the date change happened. The vast majority of writings from the time are dated to known events, like eclipses, or by reference to other known things ("20 years ago, when Joe was born" and then finding Joe's birth records). If calendars really did advance 300 years, we are living past the advance. That means that when we see a writing reference an eclipse that we know happened in what we call 900, it doesn't actually tell us anything about the calendar having moved or not. It only tells us that something was observed 1122 years ago. That could be 900 years after 0AD, or it could be 600. Actually, almost every instance of dating anything back then depends upon few relative date calculations which are "known". The eclipse happened 1000 years ago, so that is year 1022, and this writing referencing it is from 1022, and so this scholar writing a generation later is from 1082. This inscribed rock was found under 1100 years of dust, so the people living here were from 922, and their language existed at that time, and all records we find from this civilization are now known to be from the early 900s. Now we can claim to have evidence that there was thriving commerce in the 900s with hundreds of written records about it, so of course the dates weren't changed. If you dig into the records people cite as evidence against the phantom time hypothesis, the vast majority of them (literally every one that I've seen) is using indirect dating in this way, which doesn't mean anything.

2-718-281-828 4y 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"?

simiones 4y 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.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  > Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. I read the whole article and I did not understand this part describing the premise of the conspiracy. Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?
  - simiones 4y ago
    No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige value, without recording this decision anywhere. Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically slightly more plausible in a time before centralized calendars and computing). Later historians simply took the official date for granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The real date was reflected in their astronomical calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of a 13-day one. Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed in the article, and others.

kmeisthax 4y 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?"

User23 4y 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.