History Online - Middle Ages
[an error occurred while processing this directive]The Dark Ages and the Renaissance epochs
Europe and the Mediterranean
In the history of Europe and the Mediterranean, there are several Renaissance epochs during which many achievements of ancient scientific thought, lost in the period of the Dark Ages, were discovered. The epoch in the history of Europe when many scientific facts and cultural habits of the past were rediscovered (from the 13th to the 16th century) has been studied most extensively. Such duplication is explicitly traced in astronomy, military engineering, architecture, literature, and many other branches of science and art. For example, the famous Greek fire, which had played such an important role in the sea battles of antiquity, and which had then been forgotten for centuries, was rediscovered only in the Middle Ages.
To calculate the dates of ancient events is not as simple as it may seem at first glance. The final proof of the correctness of certain dates still remains a problem today. It continues to attract the attention of historians and the specialists of physical and chemical dating methods. It is but natural: The further we move from an ancient event in time, the harder it is to date it. The contradictions that often arise in doing so have caused some historians to express doubts regarding the dating of certain events, as suggested by the first chronologists of the 16th to the 18th century, which, by the way, are still accepted with few exceptions at present . A new scientific discipline was born, namely, hypercriticism, which denied not only the correctness of dating a particular event, but also the trustworthiness of certain ancient events. The famous representative of this school, who specialized in the history of ancient Rome, T. Mommsen, noted, in particular, that different versions of dating the foundation of Rome diverged to the extent of 500 years, and that this oscillation influenced the dating of all the documentation counting years since the 'foundation of Rome'.
Apart from the classical Renaissance, the Carolingian Renaissance (the time of Charlemagne) is also generally known, when many authors imitated the antique paragons, duplicating the literary themes which had been forgotten earlier. Similar phenomena (termed Restoration) are also known in the history of ancient Egypt. The prominent Orientalist B.A. Turaev noted that the culture of the Saite period had reproduced that of the Old Kingdom: 2,000-year-old texts again went into use, tombs were decorated following the ancient ways, titles that had sunk into oblivion were reintroduced, and so forth.
As we see, duplicates present themselves as a rather frequent phenomenon in history. Naturally, the question arises as to how they are distributed in time: in a random manner or subject to some covert governing law?
How to substantiate ancient chronology
Chronological problems interested the Egyptologists, too. Thus, H. Brugsch stressed the enormous difference in the determination of the date when Menes had been placed on the throne, writing that the difference between the extreme conclusions was striking, it being equal to 2,079 years. In spite of all the discoveries in this branch of Egyptology, the numerical data were (at the end of the 19th century) still in a very unsatisfactory state.
Another example: The chronology of certain events in Egyptian history, which was given by Herodotus in his famous Histories, differs by more than a millennium from that accepted today. Herodotus' chronology is much shorter than the modern version; sometimes, he even places near each other (see ) rulers who according to the modern version are separated by 18 centuries.
But especially many discrepancies show up if one compares the dates given in medieval texts with the dating ascribed to them today. The distinguished modern chronologist E. Bickerman even speaks of 'the chaos of medieval datings'.
Chronology in its present form was created in a series of fundamental works by the founders of modern chronology as a science, J. Scaliger (1540-1609) and D. Petavius (1583-1652). It became a precise science later; however, the work is not yet completed, and, as Bickerman notes, there is no sufficiently complete investigation of ancient chronology that would satisfy modern requirements.
It is not surprising that certain sceptical minds have drawn dramatic conclusions from the above-mentioned difficulties. Thus, as early as the 16th century, a professor of Salamanca University, de Arcilla, published two papers in which he stated that the whole of history preceding the 4th century had been falsified (see de Arcilla, Programma Historicae Universalis, Divinae Florae His-toricae). The same conclusion was reached by the historian and archaeologist J. Hardouin (1646-1724), who regarded the entire classical literature as the work of 16th-century monks. Isaac Newton devoted many years to historical and chronological studies. Having thoroughly investigated practically the entire historical and theological literature, he wrote Abreges de la Chronologic asserting that the time scale of the chronology of antiquity was unnaturally extended. Newton made up his own tables in accordance with a new version of chronology which related the biblical texts to the history of the Mediterranean. In his book Newton, V.G. Kuznetsov wrote that Newton had collected
'fantastically large volumes of historical material. This was the total of forty years of work, toilsome research and enormous erudition. Newton, in fact, studied all the basic literature in ancient history and all primary sources ...' .
'Certainly, being unable to read cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts and having no archaeological data, which were then unavailable,... Newton was in error to the extent not only of tens or hundreds of years, but even millennia ...'.
As a matter of fact, many of the most important events of Greek history were chronologically moved forwards by Newton by 300 years, and those of Egyptian history by 1,000 and even 1,800 years.
And now in this century, in his Historic und Kritik, the German researcher R. Baldauf was proving on the basis^of philological arguments that not only ancient but even early medieval history was a later falsification.
An attempt to systematize the considerable critical material and to analyze historical paradoxes and duplicates from the standpoint of natural science was carried out in the work of a scientist with encyclopaedic knowledge, the revolutionary, public figure and honorary academician, N.A. Morozov (1854-1946) . He actually held the opinion of de Arcilla and believed that traditional chronology had been artificially stretched . It should be noted that he apparently came to this idea independently of de Arcilla. Remarkable scientific intuition and strict logical argumentation permitted Morozov to list numerous data in support of such a conjecture. However, his striving to dot all the i's led to poor substantiation of many of his statements; some contained factual errors, and the new chronological version as a whole (including the hypothesis regarding the falsification of ancient history) was rejected, which does not at all lessen his achievements, for the problem is so complicated and many-sided that one mind alone, even if outstanding, is unable to solve it completely.
