At 1:28 PM +0000 3/28/02, Alistair Vining wrote:
>I'm bearing in mind Sarasvati's imprecation to keep this "innocent,
>non-denominational, and non-violent", but:
>
>Arabs, Franks, and the Battle of Tours, 732: Three Accounts
>http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/732tours.html
>
Funny, I went to school with the person who put up that page. I
should ask him about it. The issue here is that the date is not
obvious. If it can be verified with Islamic records and the Muslim
calendar, then that would tell us how many years ago this happened.
Assuming the Muslim calendar verifies that as about 1270 years ago,
we then need to get independent records tallying that from some other
well-known date in the past like the reign of the emperor Augustus.
It could still be that this battle occurred 432 years or so after the
customary date for the birth of Christ rather than 732 years after
that date.
What's really needed to conclusively disprove this hypothesis is a
verifiable event well in the middle of the problematic years that can
be dated both backwards and forwards in time; i.e. that can be
established as N years before the present and X years after the reign
of one of the Caesars (or something similarly well-established.) Here
"event" should be understood quite broadly to include not only
battles, deaths of kings etc. but also buildings, coins, natural
phenomena like comets and eclipses, etc.
Failing that, it would suffice to have two events which were known to
be simultaneous, one of which could be dated forward and one of which
could be dated backwards. Or perhaps you could have two events, one
of which could be dated forward and one of which could be dated
backwards, and one of which was known to precede the other by a
certain number of years.
As John Cowan pointed out, an alternate disproof would be matching up
natural phenomena like eclipses in Roman times so that it could be
shown they must have occurred at the time the traditional calendar
says they occurred, and Franz Krojer might have already done this.
<http://www.dbs.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~krojer/obrief.html> I'm
not sure because I don't speak German, and the Babelfish translation
was too awful to follow.
The test of a good hypothesis is its falsifiability, and that's true
whether it's right or wrong or somewhere in-between. What
distinguishes science from pseudo-science (and perhaps history from
pseudo-history) is that pseudo-science is generally not falsifiable.
I think this hypothesis is clearly falsifiable. Is there an
astronomer in the house?
--+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java news: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML news: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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