Elliotte Harold continued:
> > but I suspect he trots out at least some of the classic
> >bogus claims that C14 dating is a sham.
> >
>
> No, he doesn't. He has all-new claims :-), which IMHO have not yet
> been proven to be bogus.
>
> >See the sci.skeptics FAQ for C14 claim details:
> >
> > http://home.xnet.com/~blatura/skep_5.html
> >
>
> This isn't really relevant to Niemetz's claims at all.
This I would generally concur with. Niemetz quibbles with
the details of dendrochronologist's bridging of the early
medieval periods, where well-provenienced samples are scarce
and where some dendrochronologists apparently substituted out red
beech samples (less reliable) to complete an oak chronology.
>
> >I expect a serious search will turn up thorough debunkings of Niemitz' work,
> >if anyone bothered.
> >
>
> A good suggestion. I ran a variety of search terms through Google and
> didn't come up with anything that I could recognize as relevant,
> though most of the results were in German and I couldn't read those.
> From what little I know of this, most of the serious discussion has
> taken place in German. I'd love to hear of any other links about this
> in either English or French.
>
> The really interesting thing is trying to debunk this claim. Exactly
> how do you go about proving a period of history existed? At first his
> claims felt to me like unfalsifiable proposition. ...
Well, let's see. It doesn't take much to start finding competent
archaeologists claiming sites dating to the period. See:
http://www.temple-bar.ie/harchaeology.asp
for a Temple Bar West site with an early domestic house
in Dublin dating between the late 8th and the 9th century --
correlated with the historically documented establishment of the
first permanent camp at Dublin by Vikings in AD 841. Oh right,
they were confused about their chronology, too, I guess.
> You can
> walk around Rome or Athens today and look at the evidence all around
> you. Why can't we do the same for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman
> Empire?
Well, in part because we aren't talking about monumental architecture
during the high points of major civilizations here.
But for Niemetz to get anywhere with his posited black hole of
600-900 A.D., he has to evoke grand conspiracy theories. Namely,
the documentary history of both the Roman Catholic Church and
the Byzantine Orthodox Church have to have been massively faked.
To quote Niemetz himself:
"Hypothesis One: Otto III didn't live accidentally around the year
1000 AD; he himself had defined this date! He wanted to reign in
this year, because this suited his understanding of Christian
milleniarism. He defined this date with the help of his famous and
well-versed friend Gerbert de Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II.
In reality they lived approximately seven hundred years after the
birth of Jesus Christ, but never until then had the years been
reckoned 'after Christ'. Perhaps unaware of their error and without
intending to falsify they defined one special year as '1000 AD'
(Illig 1991). Consequently chroniclers had to invent 300 years
of history. To fill up empty periods -- what a great occasion for
dynasties and kings! You can design the planned future as a construct
of the past, and this apparently happened: Otto III construed
Charlemagne as the model hero he himself wanted to be. Supposedly
he sketched Charlemagne's history only a bit, or it wasn't even
him but the generations after him who lined out a whole full life
picture. Especially the clergy hoped to get advantage in its
confrontation with the emperor, which had started in the 11th
century.
"Hypothesis Two: Constantive VII of Byzantium (905 - 959 AD)
organized a complete rewriting of the whole Byzantine history. ..."
Hmm. I see. So 54 popes in the official Catholic chronology,
from St Gregory I (the Great) through John IX (or something
along those lines) just didn't exist, and were all invented
by chroniclers who had "a great occasion for dynasties and
kings". Along with everything connected to them. And why
are those particular 54 (or whichever ones were faked -- Niemetz
doesn't bother to get into that detail) the missing ones? Why
not assume that St. Miltiades (311-314) was faked, too, for
example. Maybe they were *all* faked, and the Catholic Church
didn't exist before Pope Sylvester II.
Just *one* of the supposedly nonexistent popes was Pope St. Nicholas I
(the Great) 858 - 867, who had a rather astonishingly richly documented
life for a nonperson:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11054a.htm
Granted one should not take official lives of saints without
some historical skepticism in mind, but it seems quite a
stretch to claim all of this stuff was invented out of thin
air by chroniclers happy to indulge Otto III's and his
coconspirator, Pope Sylvester II's desire to reign during
Christ's Millennium.
> The question of why Europe suddenly fell into the Dark Ages has been
> a hotly debated subject for a long time. It's astonishing to consider
> that the answer might be that it never happened at all.
Well, stranger things have happened (or not happened), I suppose.
--Ken
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