Everything is fake

Below I link to three articles written by a French chronological revisionist, who unfortunately also seems to be a historical revisionist (think Holocaust denial). Still, his contributions are interesting and to a large extent based on the alternative history views of Gunnar Heinsohn, a recently deceased sociology professor in Germany. The author, Laurent Guyénot, actually complains in another article that Heinsohn was pro-NATO and pro-Israel!

There are several versions of the so-called “phantom time hypothesis”, according to which a large portion of the Middle Ages (and perhaps even Antiquity) never actually happened. I have previously commented on German chronological revisionist Heribert Illig´s speculations, defended in English by Emmet Scott in “A Guide to the Phantom Dark Ages”. Heinsohn´s version is somewhat different. In contrast to Illig, who posited a vast medieval conspiracy to invent three centuries of fake history, Heinsohn apparently took the more sensible position (relatively speaking) that the whole thing is a misunderstanding of sorts. Around the year 1000, European civilization was almost destroyed by a comet impact that led to widespread famines and pestilence. The survivors had only garbled memories of what had transpired before. Still, at least in Guyénot´s exegesis of Heinsohn, elements of a conspiracy still exist, for instance the Catholic Church rewriting both its own history and that of the Byzantine Empire (which the Catholics opposed) and various Renaissance humanists forging the ancient Roman manuscripts they supposedly “discovered”. Guyénot seems very pro-Byzantine and pro-Greek in his orientation, while somewhat curiously not sounding pro-Christian. The website that publishes his contributions, the Unz Review, also publishes pro-Russian content.

On one point, Heinsohn is more extreme than Illig. Heinsohn believes that the phantom centuries span a period of 700 years, not just 300! Thus, the Church Father Cyprian (3^rd century) really lived during the 10^th century (a plague that badly affected Rome is named after Cyprian). Jesus was crucified during the 8^th century. An original take is that Heinsohn believed that the original Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the “Early Middle Ages” existed simultaneously. Augustus and Diocletian were contemporaries, and Charlemagne was a Roman vassal. The Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain at the same time as the Romans, both of them fighting the Celts. Arab civilization was never primitive during the period in question, so presumably Islam was the religion of an advanced high culture from the beginning. Heinsohn claims that there is archeological evidence for this, or rather that there is a noticeable lack of archeological evidence for a 700-year period…

I find all this difficult to believe, but some of the arguments are interesting in their own right (for instance about the Greek and Latin languages). It´s also fun to speculate what this means for Scandinavian history. Presumably, the Vikings and the Heruli are the same people, and the Old Uppsala mounds really are Viking. The famous settlement of Birka was abandoned due to the comet impact. That Theoderic the Great and Attila are prominently mentioned in much later Norse sagas may be because the sagas were written shortly after their time.

Make of this material what you wish! 

How fake is Roman antiquity

How fake is Church history

How long was the first millennium?