Tópico: A Idade Média foi realmente tão ruim assim ?

[4 Ton Mantis]

Há quem diga que a vida de grande miséria,doenças e grande retrocesso social por que a Europa passou durante a Idade Média(476-1453)foi um exagero(?) de historiadores e pesquisadores e que a sociedade medieval "não era tão ruim como dizem".Afinal,o que se pode dizer a vida nos tempos medievais ?

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Tópico: 5 razões pelas quais a Idade Média não foi a “idade das trevas”

[Gigaview]

The Phantom Time Hypothesis

The latest issue of Fortean Times has another of my letters in it... or rather, the first paragraph of one of my letters. Originally it was the introductory preamble to a much longer letter about the "Phantom Time Hypothesis" (FT276:58)(*) -- the idea that there was a grandiose conspiracy during the Middle Ages to fabricate three hundred years of non-existent history.

As it turns out, I'm rather relieved that the latter part of the letter didn't make it into print, because the theory was convincingly demolished by another letter in the same issue from Steve Moore (who points out that the so-called "Phantom Time" is a purely European phenomenon, which doesn't hold water if you look further afield).

What I said in my original letter was that (in my opinion) most supposed "top-level government conspiracies" are actually "bottom-level civil service cock-ups". The Phantom Time Hypothesis, if there is even a grain of truth to it, is likely to be an example of this. It's a theory for which the most persuasive evidence is actually lack of evidence. In the whole of Europe, there is a dearth of material that can be dated to the immediate post-Roman period: say AD 600 - 1000. Compared with the centuries flanking this period, there are almost no great buildings, no paintings, no engineering works, very few written records... not even much in the way of coins or pottery fragments. It's obvious that Europe in those days wasn't a place of soaring intellectual and cultural ambitions... so it seems pretty doubtful that its rulers would have been driven to concoct a sophisticated and complex conspiracy merely to fool later generations of historians.


What seems far more likely (I said in my letter) is that record-keeping during the post-Roman period became so vague and disjointed that, when later historians tried to make sense of it, they ascribed four hundred years of history to what had actually taken only one hundred years. This would explain why there is so little archaeological evidence from that period, and why the art and science of the eleventh century is so little advanced on that of Roman times (for example, the model on the left depicts the Roman temple complex in Bath as it would have looked in the fourth century AD... although in terms of architectural style and engineering principles it could easily date from six or seven hundred years later).

In light of Steve Moore's comments about Chinese chronology, it's clear that (no matter how incompetent mediaeval scribes and chroniclers were) there isn't room in the post-Roman chronology for three phantom centuries, or even a single phantom century. But the odd year or decade here or there... who's to know? Once an error like that took hold, it would be almost impossible to shake off -- no matter what new evidence was found. If a historian firmly believed he was living in, say, the year 1284, this would be the one "truth" that he'd never think of questioning -- any new historical evidence would have to be twisted to conform to it!

http://forteana-blog.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Conspiracy%20theories

(*) Veja próximo post

[Gigaview]

The Phantom Time Hypothesis (FT276:58)

You know what they say about the early Middle Ages, don’t you? If you can remember them, you weren’t really there. However, if you could recall those times, was this simply because you had been making up the entire era as a state-enrolled forger? If so, this would be explicable by the Phantom Time Hypothesis (PTH), a chronological theory almost unheard of in its radicalism, and which has been propagating steadily through German academic circles since 1998.

Picture a mediæval-style ‘Man­hattan Project’ with scriptoria instead of hangars, and Gothic minuscule instead of maths. Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980–1002) has engaged his theo­logians under the leadership of Gerbert d’Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) in a project that is among the most zealous and secretive of its kind since the facsimile houses of Alexandria were at their busiest. The gilding of narratives has many precedents in the writing of hist­ories, especially self-aggrandising ones. But the one described by the PTH takes this art of embellishment up a few more notches: more than two centuries worked up from scratch, then infiltrated into as many chronologies as possible. Only a Middle Gothic or a Byzantine fanatic could have taken it to such lengths. But it worked. And as the traces were destroyed, the histories reconfigured and rebound, no one was any the wiser. At least until Heribert Illig and his adherents apparently figured it out.

Illig’s theory is rooted in the introduct­ion of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. It had long been known that the old Julian calendar had a defect – the Julian year being roughly 11 minutes too long – and the new calendar was designed to correct this discrepancy, to the tune of making up for 10 days that gradually slipped during the years between AD 1 and AD 1582. But Illig alleged that the Julian calendar should have produced a discrepancy of not 10 but 13 days over the period in question, and concluded that roughly three centuries had been added to the calendar that had never existed. His response was to run with the notion of calendar “slack” and look for corroborat­ive evidence.

The obvious period to look at was the most obscure one: the Dark Ages. Byzantinists and architectural historians are largely responsible for giving us the period from c. 600–900, about which almost nothing is known in cultural or urban development. The historical sources simply aren’t in the ground or the archives. This raises the ‘debate of continuity’, explained by groups of ‘Gradualists’ who bicker learnedly over whether the period happened so slowly that the participants hardly noticed it, or that it was a kind of torpid aftermath from Antiquity’s brilliance. The glaring exception here is the Carolingians, and the luminous figure of Charlemagne who is meant to have reigned from 768 to 814. Illig zeroes in on the polymath qualities of Charlemagne as recorded in various texts which make him an architect, astronomer, educator, philo­logist, folklorist, lawmaker and more. For Illig, “the conclusion is simple: far too much is ascribed to this one person.”[1]

Speaking of these texts, Illig stresses that “[T]he number of genuine documents diminishes all the time. In fact, it’s moving towards zero.” The physical sources of this period are best embodied by the Aachen Palatine Chapel; yet its anomalies, which include a dome without a precedent (or a Carolingian successor) and the lack of a building tradition in the 400-year gap between the Romans and the Franks,[2] makes Illig certain that: “Carolingian buildings do not fit into the history of the arts as it is taught today.” Taking the Palatine Chapel out of the Carolingian Renaiss­ance removes the ‘ecclesiastical heart’ from the Frankish Empire. “With the loss of this dome alone,” says Illig, “the tradition of Charlemagne’s giant empire crumbles to dust.”[3]

Others who’ve taken up the Phantom Time Hypothesis find evidence from further east. Uwe Topper and Manfred Zeller use the PTH to resolve such problems as why the architecture of the Umayyads has untypical character­istics;[4] why Arab coins under the caliph Abd al Malik bear the portrait of a dead King; and why the famous historical epic, the Shahnameh, wraps up in the mid 7th century AD, with a gap of 300 years to its time of writing in AD 1010, and has no allusions to Islam. From this they discern a phantom time period of 78 years that came into being “through artificial separation of the Persian and Umayyad history which in reality was contemporan­eous”.[5] This puts the origin of Islam in a bit of an awkward spot, but may at least remove some of the mystery from its near-miraculous success. The history of the dynasty of Harun al-Rashid, greatest of the Abassid caliphs, with all the expedit­ions he led and the diplomatic gifts he gave to Charlemagne (including a clock that dropped bronze balls into a bowl, and two albino elephants) were dreamt up at a scribe’s desk.

Phantom Time is also borne out by Jewish history, which “totally disapp­eared together with the breakdown of the Roman Empire”, not resurfacing in evid­ence until the Carolingian period.[6] The difficulty Dr Hans-Ulrich Niemitz sees with archæological sources, for which he cites the absence of German town stratigraphies from the relevant era and the achingly slow development of north German ceramics from the 7th–9th cent­uries AD, is that it is not dated independently of written sources. This contravenes proper archæological method. Specialists referring to neighbouring disciplines to solve their problems, Neimitz argues, fall into circular reasoning, discounting the whole situation and thus missing the bigger picture.

Also discussed by Niemitz is dendro­chronology, or tree-ring dating. The field has only recently bridged all the gaps in European history over two millennia; but, says Niemitz, this achievement relies on far too few samples to date the Middle Ages. More pointedly still, in Niemitz’s view, Ernst Hollstein, Germany’s leading dendrochrono­logist, fatally changed the method­ology by allowing the sequence samples to admit red beech (alongside oak) to bridge the critical 8th cent­ury with a sequence predated by historians. An archæological no-no, you’ll recall. Hollstein despaired that: “It is strange, but it has proved extremely difficult to connect the Merovingian wood samples from excavations with the above mentioned chronologies,” and that “all attempts to get enough tree ring sequences from timber of the Carolingian times have failed…”[7]

Illig offers hypotheses and suspects for this grandest of deceptions. The first is that Otto III had his teacher, Gerbert d’Aurillac, the best-read man in Christendom, direct the product­ion and insertion of 300 extra years because he wanted to be ‘Christian Man of the Millennium’ in the year AD 1000 (in the event, two years before Otto’s death). Or did Constantine VII (AD 905–959) rewrite Byzantine hist­ory by having the monks convert every single piece of Greek majuscule into the new minuscule script, before destroying the originals, changing all existing texts in two generations, or even faster?

Niemitz’s two key questions are: when, how, and why was history falsified by 300 years, and how come scientists seemingly didn’t notice sooner?[8] “The second question,” says Niemitz, “implicitly triggers the threat of a changing of the paradigms, which implies a threat to confidence in the work of all scientists working in historical research.” This could be a sleight-of-hand argument, when a more pointed question might be: what’s the point of going to all the trouble? What’s to be gained? If the Otto III scenario is to carry any weight, the question of motive cannot be brushed under the carpet, as Niemitz wants it to be. The Emperor must have been very concerned indeed about his image in history, since his bogus chronology could only have been written with posterity in mind. Why? Because the great majority of those who would have been able to consume it at the time Otto III was alive were already involved in faking it. Practic­ally everyone who mattered within the Emperor’s dominion would have been complicit, negating its intended effect.

Perhaps this is beside the point. As exponents of the PTH are mindful, it is an idea that challeges what is considered to be immutable, exposing weak points and championing the need for more interdisciplinary study. There is also a call for research to be done outside the usual group, since, as philosopher of scientific breakthroughs Thomas Kuhn has explained,[9] only a few scientists are willing to reopen research into a problem that the group considers to have been solved (sometimes on the word of a single expert). I suspect economists know well how true this is – as do forteans. Enough uncertainty exists over inconsistent Dark Ages knowledge, and how the evidence has been interpreted and assembled, to make such a project perfectly conceivable; and, in my view, more research across disciplines is a prime pathway towards gaining a better sense of how and why History comes into existence.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5593/phantom_time.html

[Buckaroo Banzai]

The Phantom Time Hypothesis
A number of theories claim that several centuries never actually happened, and were faked by the Church.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4332

Na direção contrária, alguns ufologistas/místicos acham que o mundo e/ou a humanidade é vastamente mais antiga.