Elliotte Rusty Harold recently said:
> 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.
> 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?
A potential problem with lunar eclipses is that the cycle repeats every 18
and a bit years, and this has been known for a long time. So a really
ingenious faker could have cut out an appropriate number of years. Seems a
bit of a leap though to realise that eclipses could be used to verify dates.
As for the number of days out of sync since Julius Caesar's time, I don't
have the full details but the calendar had problems after Julius changed it.
His Greek astonomer said leap years every four years. So they did.
Unfortunately the Romans counted inclusively but the Greeks exclusively
(like we do). So every four years to the Romans is what we would call every
three years. It took them a while to realise. Augustus had a go at the
calendar too. Pinched a day from February leaving it with just 28/29 (Julius
gave it 29/30) and gave it to the month renamed after him (so it would be
the same length as July). Would that cause a one day shift of the spring
equinox too?
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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