# Gunnar Heinsohn's thesis about AD Chronology



## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohns-latest.html

https://www.unz.com/article/how-long-was-the-first-millenium/

Gunnar Heinsohn is a retired professor from Bremen, who has come forward with a revolutionary thesis that asserts the historical period on the 'early medieval ages' from AD 230 to AD 930 (a period with no historical documentation nor archaeological finds) to be a 'phantom age', i.e. non-existent. In the 17th century the German humanist Scaliger together with Jesuit scholars invented the AD chronology that we have become used to (nowadays adapted to Common Era & Before Common Era). On basis of the archaeological stratification of earth layers Heinsohn concludes that 700 years of the First Millenium simply didn't exist. 
It would mean that the year zero (reckoned to coincide with the birth of Jesus Christ) in the AD chronology would be the year 753 in the new chronology. The time-distance between the first crusade and the crucifixion also would be dramatically shortened.

Well, your thoughts please about the Dark Ages: did they exist or are they the result of a 17th century chronology invention?


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

TxllxT said:


> https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohns-latest.html
> 
> https://www.unz.com/article/how-long-was-the-first-millenium/
> 
> ...


No, I don't think some 700 years have been invented, or don't actually exist. I can see a few years being skipped or added, in other words, not counted properly, but not 700 years. I can believe that there have been a few extra years added, or a few years subtracted, so this is not actually the year 2020.

The so-called dark ages were only dark in Europe where there are few written records, there was plenty of history in other parts of the world - the Middle East, India, China, etc. There are ice core records in Greenland that corroborate some of our atmospheric histories.

I thought the first year was year one, not year zero.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

sounds like a crackpot. Wikipedia says he is a sociologist, not even a historian. I very much doubt that 700 years would just disappear. As Senza Sordino says, there are other civilizations that kept history records, there is carbon dating and all other historical methods etc. It simply took 700 years for the Germanic tribes to achieve some level a civilization.

For example the Slavs had no alphabet until 850AD or so, when two monks from the Byzantine Empire (Cyril and Methodius) taught them the alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius

The German tribes adopted the Roman writing


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## Guest (Sep 30, 2020)

Jacck said:


> *sounds like a crackpot*.


You could well be right about it being a crackpot theory. I'm waiting for the contribution of DavidA to clarify things before I make any detailed comment as a committed atheist.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

TxllxT said:


> Gunnar Heinsohn is a retired professor from Bremen, who has come forward with a revolutionary thesis that asserts the historical period on the 'early medieval ages' from AD 230 to AD 930 (a period with _*no historical documentation*_ nor archaeological finds) to be a 'phantom age', i.e. non-existent.


Two items...

"The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, _written by the Venerable Bede in about AD 731_, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally"

"Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge, in Suffolk, England, is the site of two early medieval cemeteries _that date from the 6th to 7th centuries_. Archaeologists have been excavating the area since 1939."

I rest my case.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Prof. Heinsohn's thesis goes against everything I know about ACE 230-930. The late Roman emperors in the West up to 476 AD, the Merovingion royal families, primitive as they were, and the Christian Church in Rome are documented in detail, and though there were many errors the idea that the whole era did not exist beggars the imagination.


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Prof Heinsohn's thesis is based on the so-called 'catastrophe layer' of blackened earth (indicating an apocalyptic event that affected a great part of the earth) that under influence of the AD chronology had to be attributed to three different historical periods, while Heinsohn maintains that this is just one and the same event. I must say that this archaeology based argument seems pretty convincing... But I also acknowledge that Heinsohn's other writings are quite extremist. But what to make of hundreds of years of history that simply didn't leave a trace? Is that historically possible?


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## Room2201974 (Jan 23, 2018)

If an era didn't exist you wouldn't need money, and yes, these are archeological finds.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

The Catholic Church has an exhaustive listing of popes and their dates of accession and death, often with month and day even in the earliest entries. Similarly, the dynastic histories in China were maintained in detail by official historians from well before what we consider the Christian era. I have never heard of an instance where the two timelines could be related and yielded a discontinuity.

Similarly, radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (tree ring dating) and both usable within the date range in question. Again, I have never heard of any evidence that a significant range of years is “missing.” And it is certain that a lot of fame-seeking scientists would love nothing more than to find such a thing.


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

KenOC said:


> The Catholic Church has an exhaustive listing of popes and their dates of accession and death, often with month and day even in the earliest entries. Similarly, the dynastic histories in China were maintained in detail by official historians from well before what we consider the Christian era. I have never heard of an instance where the two timelines could be related and yielded a discontinuity.
> 
> Similarly, radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (tree ring dating) and both usable within the date range in question. Again, I have never heard of any evidence that a significant range of years is "missing." And it is certain that a lot of fame-seeking scientists would love nothing more than to find such a thing.


There might be quite a number of doubling popes' names, so just having composed a list of names is historically not sound enough. Of many dark ages popes there exists just their name. But what about the main argument: when you start to dig in an archaeological site, everywhere you will come against a black layer of earth that indicates 'the catastrophe layer'. Heinsohn has noticed that the dating of this layer has become dependent on fitting within the existent AD chronology. He wants to start with archaeological stratification as the basis for chronology. The 'catastrophe layer' in this stratification does not point to three hundreds-of-years-separated-of-each-other catastrophes but one single apocalyptic event. This acceptance of the world catastrophe that happened causes the dark ages to shrink.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> There might be quite a number of doubling popes' names, so just having composed a list of names is historically not sound enough. Of many dark ages popes there exists just their name. But what about the main argument: when you start to dig in an archaeological site, everywhere you will come against a black layer of earth that indicates 'the catastrophe layer'. Heinsohn has noticed that the dating of this layer has become dependent on fitting within the existent AD chronology. He wants to start with archaeological stratification as the basis for chronology. The 'catastrophe layer' in this stratification does not point to three hundreds-of-years-separated-of-each-other catastrophes but one single apocalyptic event. This acceptance of the world catastrophe that happened causes the dark ages to shrink.


did he publish it in a peer reviewed journal?


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Jacck said:


> did he publish it in a peer reviewed journal?


He wrote it down in the book "Wie lange währte das erste Jahrtausend?" (How long did the first millennium last?) in 2011 but was not able to find a publisher, probably because of its sheer radicality. https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohn-ravenna-and-chronology.html


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> He wrote it down in the book "Wie lange währte das erste Jahrtausend?" (How long did the first millennium last?) in 2011 but was not able to find a publisher, probably because of its sheer radicality. https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohn-ravenna-and-chronology.html


I dont really have enough knowledge to argue about it. But there is something else I find interesting in terms of archeology/history/biblical myths.

cca 10500 BC there was an abrupt climatic changes called Younger Dryas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
that led to extinction of mammoths and other animals

Göbekli Tepe is the oldest archeological site on Earth and some people claim that they have deciphered the inscriptions on the monoliths
http://maajournal.com/Issues/2017/Vol17-1/Sweatman and Tsikritsis 17(1).pdf

and that the Younger Dryas was caused by a comet striking the Earth, causing massive cooling and return of Ice Age, the subsequent melting of that ice could be the biblical flood. The myths about the flood simply survived as ancient collective memory.


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

In 1582 the Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregor, replacing the Julian calendar. During the 19th century upheaval was caused by the assertion of critical Bible scholars, that the birth of Jesus actually happened in AD 6. (This of course became a cause for derision among anti-clerical intellectuals). So matters of chronology & calendar have been a little liquid and prone for change before. Gunnar Heinsohn's thesis doesn't carry an anti-Christian bias, as far as I know, but is just the result of looking for a rational explanation concerning 700 years of 'Dark Ages' when nothing happened and no record of this nothing-is-happening was kept. Perhaps the 17th century scholars Scaliger and some Jesuits intended to give the Christian tradition more importance by giving it a longer history...


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> In 1582 the Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregor, replacing the Julian calendar. During the 19th century upheaval was caused by the assertion of critical Bible scholars, that the birth of Jesus actually happened in AD 6. (This of course became a cause for derision among anti-clerical intellectuals). So matters of chronology & calendar have been a little liquid and prone for change before. Gunnar Heinsohn's thesis doesn't carry an anti-Christian bias, as far as I know, but is just the result of looking for a *rational explanation concerning 700 years of 'Dark Ages' when nothing happened and no record of this nothing-is-happening was kept*. Perhaps the 17th century scholars Scaliger and some Jesuits intended to give the Christian tradition more importance by giving it a longer history...


and we just have to believe this? What about the history of the Frankish Empire? The Merovingian and Carolingian Empire? 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovingian_dynasty
they have coins from that time (depicted in the wiki article) for every king. And what is this "'catastrophe layer' of blackened earth" anyway? I never heard about it.


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Jacck said:


> and we just have to believe this? What about the history of the Frankish Empire? The Merovingian and Carolingian Empire?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovingian_dynasty
> they have coins from that time (depicted in the wiki article) for every king. And what is this "'catastrophe layer' of blackened earth" anyway? I never heard about it.


Well, for me these matters are new as well. I take it like brain teasers: what if Byzantium and Rome existed simultaneously (with the Roman presence extended into 'the dark ages'), what if the Romans competed with the Anglo-Saxons in conquering Britain from the Celts? Charlemagne lived in a Roman villa in Ingelsheim, etc. Why has Czech history this hiatus of hundreds of years in 'the dark ages' just like Polish history? Heinsohn's thesis causes a kind of short circuit for those who are comfortably used to diachronic history (first there were the Romans, then the Goths, then there was the mass migration in the dark ages); Heinsohn let's the Roman presence in Europe last until AD 930; is this so weird when one takes notice of the Byzantine presence (lasting until 1453)?


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

No archaeological finds? So any Roman coins from the reign of Maximinus Thrax (235-238) onwards featured emperors or claimants who didn't exist or didn't rule when we thought they did? Constantine the Great was supposed to have ruled the Roman Empire for thirty years some 300 after the birth of JC - where does that put him now?


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

elgars ghost said:


> No archaeological finds? So any Roman coins from the reign of Maximinus Thrax (235-238) onwards featured emperors or claimants who didn't exist or didn't rule when we thought they did? Constantine the Great was supposed to have ruled the Roman Empire for thirty years some 300 after the birth of JC - where does that put him now?


With coins there is trouble: how long were they circulating, how often were they copied etc. Heinsohn's thesis is taking away 700 years of AD chronology, but he doesn't take away archaeological artefacts nor historical documentation, but puts these artefacts and documentation into a much shortened chronology (where 700 years of 'dark ages' are left out). In Tiberias, Galilee, the Aleppo Codex was written in the 10th century. The Dead Sea scrolls are from est. 408 BCE to 318 CE. Nothing in between was found, lasting 700 years. Heinsohn's thesis states that these 700 years do not exist. This means that in Tiberias there never were 700 years with the scribes doing nothing. Try to explain why they were doing nothing, 700 years long!


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## Bwv 1080 (Dec 31, 2018)

Followed the link and I dont think you (or the crackpot at Unz) are presenting Gunnar's argument correctly. He appears to be arguing not that the years 230-900 did not exist (which is amazingly stupid, on par with flat earth or moon landing hoax theories), but that there was a massive European depopulation leading to the loss of archeological strata.

https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohn-in-a-nutshell.html


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

All this reminds me of Immanuel Velikovsky, probably the greatest of the 20th century cranks. "His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the Old Testament) to argue that Earth suffered catastrophic close contacts with other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient history." (from Wiki)

Many years ago I read his most famous book _Worlds in Collision_ and found it quite enjoyable, if not very convincing.

Added: I see that Wiki's entry on Heinsohn relates his theories to Velikovsky's, with more than a few mentions!


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Bwv 1080 said:


> Followed the link and I dont think you (or the crackpot at Unz) are presenting Gunnar's argument correctly. He appears to be arguing not that the years 230-900 did not exist (which is amazingly stupid, on par with flat earth or moon landing hoax theories), but that there was a massive European depopulation leading to the loss of archeological strata.
> 
> https://www.q-mag.org/gunnar-heinsohn-in-a-nutshell.html


Gunnar Heinsohn's thesis is about a big catastrophe being reported from three sources to be reports of three different perspectives on the very same plague/vulcanic ashes horror, while in the common view these reports are distributed to three different historical periods. This confluence of three into one catastrophe causes 700 years to disappear. But instead of smoking crack try to answer the questions rationally: there exist hardly any textual differences between the Aleppo codex and the Dead Sea scrolls. Do you believe in the miracle that for 700 years they copied and copied manuscripts with no mistakes being made? If yes, then you are following the traditionalist view which is happily crackpotting over miracles. If, no, then Heinsohn's thesis seems really quite elegant and unbiased.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> Why has Czech history this hiatus of hundreds of years in 'the dark ages' just like Polish history?


Do we? The first mention of Slavs comes from the Romans in 1st century. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula_Veneti

the end of the Roman empire was a pretty hectic period in Europe, that is known as Migration Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
The original inhabitants of Europe were Celts, then came of wave of German migration and then a Slavic migration. They were likely fleeing some barbarians from the asian steppes (as always)

We have some old myths of the founding of my nation. According to the myths, a man called Čech led the Czech tribes during the migration and settled in what is now Czech Republic. There is no English wiki, but you said you can speak czech
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praotec_Čech

The oldest known states on Czech territory are the Samo's Empire between 631 and 658 AD and the Great Moravia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moravia

The Germanic (including the Anglo-Saxon) and Slavic tribes are simply barbarians that came into prominence after the fall of older civilizations in Greece, Rome, Egypt etc.


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Jacck said:


> Do we? The first mention of Slavs comes from the Romans in 1st century.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula_Veneti
> 
> the end of the Roman empire was a pretty hectic period in Europe, that is known as Migration Period
> ...


The 'barbarians' of late antiquity quite probably were no barbarians at all, but were 100% assimilated to the Roman life style. So who is Roman and who is barbarian in the Empire? It is possible that the Christian prominence eclipsed the barbarian/Roman presence, but that doesn't mean that the Roman lifestyle disappeared. In Heinsohn's thesis the time-distance between the Renaissance (the resurrection of the Roman lifestyle, pagan thinking etc.) and the Romans (/Barbarians) is just +500 years, not an unbelievable +1200 years. What happens to Roman/Greek books when they are stored in moisty monasteries full of fanatical anti-pagan monks: they fall apart, they are burned and disappear. In Heinsohn's thesis the survival of 'pagan' philosophy books becomes understandable.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> The 'barbarians' of late antiquity quite probably were no barbarians at all, but were 100% assimilated to the Roman life style. So who is Roman and who is barbarian in the Empire? It is possible that the Christian prominence eclipsed the barbarian/Roman presence, but that doesn't mean that the Roman lifestyle disappeared. In Heinsohn's thesis the time-distance between the Renaissance (the resurrection of the Roman lifestyle, pagan thinking etc.) and the Romans (/Barbarians) is just +500 years, not an unbelievable +1200 years. What happens to Roman/Greek books when they are stored in moisty monasteries full of fanatical anti-pagan monks: they fall apart, they are burned and disappear. In Heinsohn's thesis the survival of 'pagan' philosophy books becomes understandable.


barbarian was a Roman word for all those tribes outside and inside their empire, that were not Roman - all those Goths, Vikings, Huns, Vandals, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Celts etc. The Romans were writing the history and they were likely as shauvinistic as all such empires. I remember that I watched a documentary about the "barbarian" Celts some years ago, and they were likely not as "barbaric" as the Romans described them


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Jacck said:


> barbarian was a Roman word for all those tribes outside and inside their empire, that were not Roman - all those Goths, Vikings, Huns, Vandals, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Celts etc. The Romans were writing the history and they were likely as shauvinistic as all such empires. I remember that I watched a documentary about the "barbarian" Celts some years ago, and they were likely not as "barbaric" as the Romans described them


Already the thought of inside and outside the Empire is a construction. The Christian church came to prominence within the Empire, while 'outside the Empire' the Roman lifestyle was continued. I do not accept the propagandistic Christian view that 'the barbarians' were horrific murderers without manners etc. No, the influence of pagan Rome was enormous and passing all borders. The islam originated as an anti-trinitarian (anti-Christian) sect, but was very well cultured.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

TxllxT said:


> Already the thought of inside and outside the Empire is a construction. The Christian church came to prominence within the Empire, while 'outside the Empire' the Roman lifestyle was continued. I do not accept the propagandistic Christian view that 'the barbarians' were horrific murderers without manners etc. No, the influence of pagan Rome was enormous and passing all borders. The islam originated as an anti-trinitarian (anti-Christian) sect, but was very well cultured.


Christ attempted a revolution against both the Jewish traditionalists and Rome - a genius one - that ultimately subverted the Roman Empire to such a degree, that it was forced to switch from prosecuting Christians to adopt it as its state religion. And as soon as Christianity became the Romes state religion, it began to rot with a rot that always comes from power (then the power-hungry popes started to compete with the power-hungry emperors for power). People in the West nowadays see Islam as mostly primitive and barbaric, but in its time it was revolutionary and clearly a very positive thing for the Middle East, and it dramatically improved on the rights of women and banished many barbaric practices from that time. Islam at its height in the 12th century was likely more advanced and cultured than Europe at that time. In Middle Ages, European scholars were translating from Arabic scholars such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) etc. I do not know what happened there that the progress halted.


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## Bwv 1080 (Dec 31, 2018)

TxllxT said:


> Gunnar Heinsohn's thesis is about a big catastrophe being reported from three sources to be reports of three different perspectives on the very same plague/vulcanic ashes horror, while in the common view these reports are distributed to three different historical periods. This confluence of three into one catastrophe causes 700 years to disappear. But instead of smoking crack try to answer the questions rationally: there exist hardly any textual differences between the Aleppo codex and the Dead Sea scrolls. Do you believe in the miracle that for 700 years they copied and copied manuscripts with no mistakes being made? If yes, then you are following the traditionalist view which is happily crackpotting over miracles. If, no, then Heinsohn's thesis seems really quite elegant and unbiased.


Yawn, go troll somewhere else. Not wasting anymore time on this 'Here is my crackpot theory - prove it wrong' BS


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Bwv 1080 said:


> Yawn, go troll somewhere else. Not wasting anymore time on this 'Here is my crackpot theory - prove it wrong' BS


You're intellectually lazy.


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## Bwv 1080 (Dec 31, 2018)

TxllxT said:


> You're intellectually lazy.


Nope, just don't see any reason to pay attention to the arguments of some Internet rando who is the disciple of some crackpot over every credible historian and archeologist. Confirmation bias is a bitch, perhaps take a pause before you dig yourself too big of a hole for your ego to let you out of


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

What We Got Wrong About The Dark Ages | King Arthur's Britain 




a docu about the Dark Ages


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

YouTube has a video with Gunnar Heinsohn about chronology


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