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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mind the Gap!
There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.
Which brings us on to those very few archeological sites that show continuous occupation from the birth of cities around 3000 BC until the end of the Classical world early in the A.D. era. These will surely demonstrate once and for all whether the Greek Dark Age, from 1200 BC to 600 BC, did or did not exist.
The best known of these sites, certainly the most archaeologically excavated of them, is Troy itself. Whether this actually is Troy is something for another time, the important point here is that a city on the banks of the Dardanelles was occupied from very near 3000 BC all the way down to Roman times.
To make Troy the absolute gold standard of excavation, each level is readily distinguishable from the later one above and the earlier one below because the city was subject to regular earthquakes, sackings, fire and similar misfortunes, leaving evidence archaeologists could clearly see as they dug down. Hence they were able to identify Troy Levels 1–9
* Level 1 at the bottom being the foundations going back to 3000 BC
* Level 9 at the top being the Roman city of 100 BC to 400 AD
* Level 7 is the one that featured the Trojan War c. 1200 BC
* Level 8 corresponds to the Greek Classical period 600–100 BC.
Denys Page, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, can put it all into limpid prose
| For 2000 years men had left traces of their living there; some chapters were brief and obscure, but there was never yet a chapter left wholly blank. |
So, from c 3000 BC until c 1000 BC, Troy is a perfectly ordinary city undergoing the usual fits and starts, and the archaeology is giving voice to this fact. Then comes something that baffles Professor Page
| Now at last there is silence, profound and prolonged for 400 years; we are asked, surely not in vain, to believe that Troy lay ‘virtually unoccupied’ for this long period of time. There is nothing at Troy to fill this huge lacuna. |
Yes, it is the famous Greek Dark Age, only this time it is in Turkey. It was all hands to the pump to explain this enigma. Was there a Trojan Dark Age as well? It appears, at first glance, not
| Yet despite the apparent lapse of several centuries, there is every indication of continuity between Troy 7 and Troy 8. The excavator, Carl Blegen, could detect no sign of a break in occupation. Furthermore, the local pottery of Troy 8 was the same distinctive, lustrous grey ware used during Troy 7 |
Dr Blegen mused on this and had a lightbulb moment
| He therefore supposed that the inhabitants of Troy 7 abandoned it for a nearby refuge, where they continued to produce this ‘Grey Minyan’ pottery for 400 years before returning. |
Stands to reason. If King Priam, Ajax, Ulysses, the Wooden Horse et al have just sacked your city, of course you’re going to seek refuge somewhere nearby. And of course you’re going to take your china nicknacks along with you. Or, if there wasn’t time, the knowledge of how to make more of it. Herr Dr Blegen gives us the full SP
| These people in 1100 BC carried with them the tradition of making Grey Minyan pottery and maintained it down to 700 BC … Did some of the inhabitants perhaps then return to Troy? Though there is nothing to prove this, we do know that in 650 BC the Trojan citadel, which had been virtually deserted for some four hundred years, suddenly blossomed into life once more with occupants who were still able to make Grey Minyan pottery. |
Those of us with second homes can see what must have happened. They had all gone off to live in the refuge right enough, but used to pop back from time to time to give the old place an airing and a dusting. You wouldn’t want to carry everything back and forth every time so obviously you’d leave a fair amount of your venerable but still serviceable Grey Minyan crockery in the cupboard. Wouldn’t you?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The story so far.
Not so much for people, as for historians and archaeologists.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Egyptologists started using ‘king-lists’ to create a chronology of Egyptian history from around 3000 BC right down to c 0 BC when there were no longer any pharaohs to list. At this point Egyptian chronology could be seamlessly blended with Christian chronology that started at 1 A.D. It was enormously helpful for Egyptology and Egyptologists.
The Ancient Egyptians had diplomatic and military dealings with other states near and far so it was possible, now the date at the Egyptian end was known, to establish when it was happening at the other end. Whatever dating system anyone was using, it could be translated into an Egyptian date which could be translated into a BC/AD date. This was enormously helpful for a whole range of academic specialties that were getting started as the modern university era was getting started.
At first.
When all these other academic studies had got established, in part thanks to Egyptologists, they soon left Egyptology far behind as more and more academics (and more and more newly-established countries) sought to fill in all the details of the past glories of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Greece… the reach of BC chronology was ever widening, ever lengthening, ever thickening.
But each one of them ran into a problem.
And it was the same problem. They couldn’t find anything going on for a large chunk of time in the general vicinity of c 1500 BC to c 500 BC. Their history and their archeology were roaring ahead but were reporting a blank canvas for a puzzlingly long epoch. It could be a few centuries, it could be more, but it was a goddamn nuisance making it join up on either side of this apparent ‘dark age’. It’s not as if there’s so much Assyrian history you can afford to lose half a millennium in the middle of it.
You and I know what has happened.
When Egyptology was in in its infancy it was only too easy to double-count dynasties or get misled by ancient Egyptians fondness for no-counting the previous dynasty. Or whatever. The early Egyptologist pioneers had put in four, five, six hundred years into their chronology which didn’t in fact exist.
We know what should have happened next
“We’re all finding the same gap, so your chronology must be wrong.”
“We’ll send out a patch.”
“Cheers.”
We know what actually happened
1. In academia, specialisms don’t talk to one another. In fact they have special rules whenever there is a need for one subject area to use material from a different one.
2. So while Aramean specialists were staring at a five hundred year gap they wouldn’t necessarily know that Classicists were reporting a similar five hundred year gap in Greece.
3. If Aramean specialists conclude the Egyptian chronology they had hitherto been relying on must be wrong and decide to eliminate the five hundred years so Aramean history can proceed seamlessly like histories normally do, Aramean history will be five hundred years adrift of everybody else’s and they will be more of a laughing stock than they already are after Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ using Aramaic dialogue. “Mum, why do we have to talk in this weirdly anachronistic way?” “I don’t know, dear, you’ll have to ask your father.” “Who is my father, mum?”
4. If five hundred years are removed from history it means all the textbooks will have to be rewritten, undergraduate lecture notes that have served well for twenty years will have to be scrapped and explanations why they’ve been teaching history all this time with five hundred years of it being totally spurious and they never even noticed will have to be prepared.
5. Nobody knows enough about Egyptian history to challenge Egyptian chronology except Egyptologists who are determined to cling on to their primacy in this area. And anyway they’re not going to carry the can for this one.
6. Nobody knows anything about these ‘dark ages’ except scholars who have made it their life’s work studying them and they are not about to declare their work has been a totally wasted life, so butt out.
7. The period 1500 BC to 500 BC is when the Bronze Age became the Iron Age so archeologists, who use these labels as paradigms, are not going to be very happy and they are big bastards out in all weathers with picks and shovels who should not be riled.
8. The period 1500 BC to 500 BC are formative years in the Christian religion and they are nasty bastards who, while they have given up burning folk for heresy, are still largely in control of major Great Powers, university appointment boards and so forth.
9. Anybody who claims five hundred years of spurious time has been added to such a well-established and basic thing as a chronology unanimously agreed by tens of thousands of accredited experts is ipso facto a looney-tune and I for one have no intention of joining their ranks, giving up a cushy job with twenty weeks holiday a year, in order to live in total penury and end up being buried in a cardboard box.
10. So it’s steady as she goes.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Where’s my Dark Age, bro?
Relax, it’s coming.
Look at it the other way round. If everyone’s ancient history is gripped in the vice of a faulty Egyptian chronology that has inserted an extraneous five hundred years that never existed
| Everyone will be reporting a Dark Age |
If anyone has escaped and is enjoying a normal history then the ‘faulty Egyptian chronology’ thesis falls. There really was a Dark Age, it affected some people but not others. By the same token, if nobody escaped this terrible experience, it would be powerful evidence
| It is the chronology that is creating the Dark Ages |
Which is it? We have already ticked the Greece and Troy boxes so now you will be able to open a box, one civilisation a day, to see whether it gets a tick (has a Dark Age, keep reading) or a cross (no Dark Age, M J Harper is out to lunch):
Anatolia
Aramaea
Assyria
Babylonia
Carthage
Cyprus
Egypt
Israel
Italy
Malta
Nubia
Persia
Sardinia
Sicily
Spain
The tension’s killing me and I know the answer!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This just popped up on Medium. I thought I would reprint it here in its entirety.
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What you know as ‘Christianity’ is actually a Medieval forgery
The story of Dionysius the Areopagite
Jonathan Poletti Published in I blog God. Nov 24, 2024
In the late 5th or early 6th century, a bunch of books by a writer out of the New Testament surfaced. They’d been hidden for centuries, and they became a sensation. They had an incredible author. Dionysius the Areopagite was mentioned in Acts 17:34 as an important man in Athens and an early convert of the apostle Paul. Somehow his writings had gone unnoticed by Christianity.
| They told an unbelievable story. He had been a witness to the major events and personalities of the Age of the Apostles. |
Dionysius writes of seeing the eclipse when Jesus was crucified. He’d met Paul and been part of his circle. He’d met James, Peter, Timothy and Titus. He’d visited John, the prophet of Revelation, on the isle of Patmos. He’d been present for the death of Mary, the mother of Jesus. And all along, he was writing books that were like glimpses into Heaven.
| There were four major theological works. |
Even the titles were thrilling to the Christian mind. The Celestial Hierarchy. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The Divine Names. Dionysus liked the word “hierarchy.” There is hierarchy in Heaven, he said, with ranks of angels. There is also to be a hierarchy on earth, from the apostles to Christian officials. A fourth work, a poem called The Mystical Theology, was different. Here Dionysius writes that God is unknown and unknowable. After all, Moses had climbed Mount Sinai to find “darkness” (cf. Ex. 20:21).
| It was an enormously influential text. |
The Mystical Theology would be re-written many times, as in the famous poem, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by John of the Cross. It also inspired the first Gothic cathedral, Basilica Cathedral of Saint Denis in Saint-Denis, France. The idea is that the viewer might be rooted to the earth, but as one’s eyes ascend, one becomes like Moses climbing Sinai.
| But to Dionysius, God was actually unknowable. |
The deity is in “darkness.” For Dionysius, individual Christians, no matter how devout, do not interact with the Creator. Our experience of God can only be through the church and the hierarchies it creates. A ‘hierarchy’, as Dionysius writes, is: “…a sacred order, an understanding and an activity being approximated as closely as possible to the divine.”
| His books were beloved by theologians as famous as Thomas Aquinas. |
They became Christianity, which became a message that the church orders human life. The church puts people where they belong in the hierarchy. The church marries people. The church authorizes political rulers. Wherever the church puts you, that’s where you belong.
As the scholar Sarah Roumas notes: “nowhere does Dionysios suggest that individuals move up or down the hierarchy.”
| His language was often very complicated. |
And there was a lot of verbiage that readers would skip over. But Christianity liked what it understood, and Dionysius was accepted as a biblical author. He was not “in” the canon, exactly, but could be cited as an authority. Wasn’t he in the Bible? And his message was: obey the hierarchy.
| In 1457, an Italian scholar made a discovery. |
Lorenzo Valla was a low-level professor of rhetoric, often at odds with Christianity. But he specialized in debunking Christian claims—like about Dionysius the Areopagite. Valla published a study that demonstrated how the writer could not have been the figure mentioned in the book of Acts. The “Dionysius” writings had quoted works from the second to the fifth centuries. His works relied, in fact, on a Neoplatonist philosopher named Proclus, who’d lived from 412 to 485 C.E.
| The insight was shocking, and many rejected it. |
Christians tried to explain the situation in a range of ways. Perhaps those later authors had been quoting the Dionysian writings! Perhaps the unknown man was just so inspired by Dionysius the Areopagite that he wrote in his name, some said. Or perhaps this author was a very devout Christian who was so humble he wouldn’t use his own name.
| The Christians who liked him, that is, continued to like him. |
But the reality was that the “Dionysian” writings were not even so clearly Christian. Declaring they had “nothing to say of Christ,” Martin Luther dismissed not just Dionysius but the Catholicism formed by him—an important stage in the birth of Protestantism. But it isn’t so easy to take Dionysus out of Christianity. Even Martin Luther clearly references many of his concepts.
| Later scholars took apart the writings. |
When “Dionysius” quoted biblical figures, it turns out he’d been quoting later Christians. He quoted “Bartholomew” when he was actually quoting a third-century Christian text, Origen’s Commentary on John. Scholars tried to find the real “Dionysius.” He was a Christian monk, many thought. But the language and perspective were often Neoplatonist.
This was an adaptation of pagan thought that arose from the third century on. They believed in God, or ‘the One’, as they called Him. They believed in spirits and heavenly agents. They believed in a need for ‘salvation’. What they didn’t believe in was Jesus Christ.
| Was “Dionysus” a Neoplatonist who passed himself off as Christian? |
As I catch up on recent scholarship on the “Dionysian” writings, that seems the suspicion. In a 2011 study, Tuomo Lankila finds the works likely written by an outright Neoplatonist. As he notes: “The Neoplatonists had a very concrete motive and tangible need to perform this fraud.”
The pagan religion was under Christian attack. It would survive, in some form, if given a semi-Christian re-write. The Dionysian writings, Lankila finds, “functioned as a pointer to Proclus.”
| Christianity wasn’t interested in how it happened. |
Even that fraud was involved is rarely said. As the scholar E.R. Dodds would note: “it is for some reason customary to use a kinder term; but it is quite clear that the deception was deliberate.” It seems incredible, now, that writings by an unknown human were accepted by Christianity. I find no effort to discuss that difficult fact.
“The story of the beginnings of their reception is little understood and tainted by a kind of scholarly distaste,” the scholar Andrew Louth writes. But the ironies are lacerating? In an era when Christians were condemned as “heretics” for even slightly varying beliefs, the religion raised an outright imposter to biblical status.
| Do Christians even like Christianity? |
To look over the Dionysius hoax, that might be the question. Jesus spoke of church leaders doing jobs like feeding people (cf. Jn 21:17, etc.). But Christian clerics were mostly jousting for power. And “Dionysus,” it seems, saw an opening. He’d wrap his beliefs in a goofy biblical storyline—adding the idea that Christian men are intended by God to be in charge of the whole world. They swallowed it all.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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It also inspired the first Gothic cathedral, Basilica Cathedral of Saint Denis in Saint-Denis, France. The idea is that the viewer might be rooted to the earth, but as one’s eyes ascend, one becomes like Moses climbing Sinai.
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This is the origin story of the early kings of France, their tombs are at the cathedral. The cathedral, the relics, the tombs are part of a unified package. Just as they were at the other Gothic cathedrals. It is a specific, invented, packaged history and chronology. The Cathedral dates to 1144, CE. It is clearly inspired around St Denis of Paris.
| Denis of Paris (Latin: Dionysius) was a 3rd-century Christian martyr and saint. According to his hagiographies, he was bishop of Paris (then Lutetia) in the third century and, together with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, was martyred for his faith by decapitation. Some accounts placed this during Domitian's persecution and incorrectly identified St Denis of Paris with the Areopagite who was converted by Paul the Apostle and who served as the first bishop of Athens. |
St Denis of Paris (the mythical founder of Christianity in France) the cathedral archaeology, and that of Saint-Denys de la Chapelle, are the key to understanding all this (in Wiley's opinion)
The rest is going to be a hopeless search for the original Dio(n), or the Neo Plato.....take your pick.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Has anyone come across Anno Domini: A Short History of the First Millennium AD by Laurent Guyénot, published March 29, 2023. Apparently it cites me in a footnote (I knew I'd mount the heights one day) and from the look of the reviews the book is revisionist but not wacky.
It's not on Kindle and I don't want to fork out twenty bucks on the paperback. Then have to read it. So someone tell me I don't need to. This is the (rather impressive) blurb
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We are so used to the idea that all major events in the histories of all nations can be fitted together on a single timeline, that we take this standard chronology for granted, as a simple representation of time itself.
In reality, this universal chronology, the backbone of textbook historiography, is a cultural construct that was not completed before the late sixteenth century, by connecting ancient chronicles with widely different dating systems. Like other European norms, it was accepted by the rest of the world during the period of Western cultural domination.
But is it correct? What confidence can we even have in the accepted European chronology of Roman Antiquity, Late Antiquity, and the Early Middle Ages, if the Anno Domini comput was not stabilized until the beginning of the second millennium?
For the first four centuries AD, it is based on the canonical Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea and its continuation by saint Jerome, in other words, on a spurious autobiography of the Christian Church, as unreliable as the Donation of Constantine. And we have to wait till the end of the eleventh century to have continuators of Eusebius and Jerome such as Sigebert of Gembloux, who had religious and political agendas of their own. This left us with a few “dark ages”, periods lacking either historical records or archaeological evidence.
Drawing from his own studies in medieval history, Laurent Guyénot highlights the many inconsistencies within the commonly accepted chronology of the first millennium AD, and provides explanations for the distortions that have crept into it. He underscores the need for a critical revision, even a paradigm shift, and examines several alternative theories, with a special focus on the stratigraphy-based chronology of the late Professor Gunnar Heinsohn.
Laurent Guyénot was born in France in 1960. He earned an engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (Paris), then a Master in Biblical Studies and a PhD in Medieval History. He is the author of a dozen books, including From Yahweh to Zion.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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King Arthur's Britain: The truth unearthed
In the fifth century, the future of Britain hung in the balance, after four centuries of straight roads and hot and cold running water the Romans left, called back to support their owen ailing Empire. The country quickly descended in... |
A PBS documentary airing tonight. It is strange how quickly one gets used to a different version. This already seems like something out of a computer game. Though actually it's not so far from what I now believe. Is anyone else suffering from this?
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