25. Phantom Time Hypothesis
How do we know that the fall of Rome in 479 AD was 1,546 years ago? Empires have risen and fallen since then, a dark age took place, historical records are fragmentary, not continuous, and they are often politically motivated or even fabricated. Do we really have any confidence that the Earth has gone round the Sun 1,546 times since Rome fell? Can we really trust the historical timeline?
There are some compelling arguments that there are a couple of hundred to even a thousand extra years in our timeline - years that didn’t actually exist. One version is that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II conspired to add 279 years to the Anno Domini dating system in order to place themselves in the year 1,000 AD and strengthen Otto’s claim to the throne.
The more interesting version, however, comes from Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian professor of mathematics who wrote History: Fiction or Science? He argues that the known physics of the moon orbiting the Earth disagrees with the historical timeline’s account of when solar eclipses happened (which imply a position of the moon at that moment in time). For example, the series of three eclipses that take place during the Sicilian Campaign according to Thucydides could only have happened nine centuries ago, not the 2,400 years ago the standard timeline places this event at. Physics and the historical record can only be reconciled if you accept that the historical timeline has hundreds of extra years added - either by accident and inaccuracy or via a grand papal conspiracy.
We go over Fomenko’s main arguments, and the obvious defences of the status quo - radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, Occam’s Razor, or an analysis of who benefits geopolitically from the promulgation of this theory. But there’s enough uncertainty to leave a non-zero chance that perhaps there is something badly wrong with our understanding of the historical record. And even if it is rubbish, it’s an interesting idea to play with. Conspiracy theories, even at their worst, force us to examine the foundation stones our knowledge systems are built on, and it’s worth investing some time every now and then to check that they are indeed sound.