Early medieval phantom time

Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Tue Oct 10 11:32:56 UTC 2000


"Clive D.W. Feather" wrote on 2000-10-10 09:30 UTC:
> Marc Lehmann said:
> > It is also not clear wether the
> > years ~600-~900 do exist or were just inserted by some calulcation error
> > during the calendar switch.
> 
> I've been wondering - what on earth does this last comment mean ? How can
> 300 years not exist and be "just inserted by some calculation error" ?

This is referring to a quite controversial but also highly interesting
theory that a group of amateur historians (mostly in Germany) has been
working on for the last 10 years. The most curious corollary of that
theory is that Charlemagne never existed and is a character of fiction
or a gross exaggeration of the biography of someone else.

Some introductory reading:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf
http://www.home.ivm.de/~Guenter/wamse.html
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/361226561X/mgk2504
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3612264923/mgk2504
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3776620854/mgk2504

Unfortunately, most of the more detailed publications (in particular the
books by Illig and Topper) are only available in German at the moment.

By the way, the term "Julian Calendar" has nothing to do with the year
numbering scheme. It only refers to the scheme that names the months and
determines their length and start. The A.D. year numbering scheme was
introduced long after the Julian Calendar, soon after the ~300 years of
"dark" early medieval period that Illig et al. claim to be phantom time
in European history; allegedly created deliberately by the introduction
of an erroneous new "A.D." year numbering scheme.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>




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