It’s not like there was NOTHING happening in Western Europe (except Charlemagne) during the whole period.
The Catholics have a pretty comprehensive list of papal successionduring that period, and they’re even nice enough to include a few antipopes who came and went in that era.
The Danes invaded England, Eric the Red and the Vikings did or didn’t explore the North Atlantic, and the Lombards conquered, then lost, Italy during that time.
Granted, it’s not a glorious history, but at least it’s a history.
There are also scientific methods of dating that wouldn’t be susceptible to historians mucking about with the books. Remains which include large pieces of wood can be dated using dendrochronology (matching patterns of tree rings), saying when the tree was cut down to within a year or less; anything containing organic matter (wood, leather, bones, etc.) can be dated to within about 50 years via carbon-14 dating, and any culture which kept astronomical records can be dated (often to within a day) by comparing their records to the known ephemera of the planets.
Assuming that DORFMONT contains “bones, etc.”, he should get himself carbon-14 dated, and use the proof that his bones are over 500 years old to claim Medicare.
I am constantly amazed that supposedly intelligent people come up with these crack-pot ideas and that other people believe them. And then I run into a birther.
Practically the entire Anglo-Saxon period in England took place during the “missing” years. Speaking of England, there’s another loony out there who maintains that, when Caesar invaded, the people were already speaking Modern English, Old English, not to mention British (ancestor of Welsh and Cornish) being just part of the Evil Conspiracy, I guess.
It’s Fomenkoism that really scares me, though. His basic thesis is that the entire ancient and medieval world was created out of the air by evil Jesuits, to conceal the fact that everything told about Jerusalem and about Rome really happened in Moscow (which conveniently makes the Russians into, more or less, Herrenvolk), and, Russia being in the state it’s currently in, the idea’s caught fire, with serious attempts being made to mandate it being taught in the schools.
Won’t work - my understanding is that carbon-14 dating works from when something stopped breathing. Unless, of course, DORFMONT is one of the undead - then it could be OK.
I was reading another classic column, “What Year Numbering System Was Used in the Time of Christ” when I noticed Cecil’s mention of the Induction, a 15-year cycle used in Roman and post-Roman times. And it tinkled a faint bell. I recalled reading back in the '70s about some historian who claimed that our calendar was 15 years off – that some monk copying the histories miscounted the Induction cycles, and the year we thought was 1973 was actually 1988.
It was nonsense then; it is nonsense now. But it is enduring nonsense, and that’s the point.
(Shame, really – we could have skipped that whole unfortunate disco / polyester / coke phase and gone right to glasnost and Willie Horton.)
To be fair, the various Asian calendars don’t have much relevance unless you can find ancient points of correspondence between Europe and Asia. Sure, we know who the Emperor of Japan was 2000 years ago, but do we know that that’s the same guy who was Emperor of Japan when Augustus Caesar was forging the Roman Empire?
I don’t know about the Chinese rulers in enough detail, but for the Japanese rulers, a bunch of them are only known from oral histories. The Kojiki is the oldest written record in Japan that I know of, and it was compiled in the 8th century. That leaves the first 1300 years essentially as undocumented as Homer’s Iliad. Sure, you could probably use physical anthropology and archeology to correlate information, but I know from experience living here that the Japanese are anything but dispassionate about the past. They tend to ignore information that doesn’t fit with their myths. It’s about like fundamentalist Christians being uninterested in anything that contradicts the Bible, but latching on to any evidence—no matter how tenuous—that supports their interpretation of history.
For example, they consistently represent the Jômon people as looking like modern Japanese when they actually looked like Ainu. Japanese are a mixture of Jômon and Yayoi people. It’s been fairly recently that the origins of the Yayoi as being from what is now south China and north Korea have been more accepted in academic circles, but many non-academics are reluctant to accept this or even offended by it.
The existence of the first 9 or 10 emperors are absolutely unsupported by any evidence. The first one that has any solid proof is Kinmei, who is #29.
I don’t know how anyone could respond to the original poster’s question, what with nearly choking to death with laughter.
“…there are no records for that period of time.” ??? Newsflash! There’s probably a staid, brick building in your town called a “Library.” In it they have these new fangled things called “Books” which, at least since c.1450, have been in plentiful supply owing to the invention of movable type.
Aside from proven events taking place in other cultures cited by Cecil and others, the writings of the Venerable Bede in England in the late 600’s-early 700’s provide ample proof of a good portion of the Middle Ages in Anglo-Saxon history. There’s also the “The Confessions of St. Augustine” a monumental tome of Catholic theology and attendant history written about the year 400 A.C.E. Even that dubious authority “Wikipedia” lists over 100 historians whose works survive today who wrote between the 6th and the 11th century.
The saddest part of ignorance is that it deprives one of the capacity for recognizing it in oneself. How can one know what one doesn’t know? OTOH, to quote Socrates - who most definitely did exist and lived in the 5th century B.C.E., “I only know that I know nothing.” In other words, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I do know. The poster of the query here is living proof that “ignorance is bliss” if wondering why nothing happened in the world over a thousand year period reflects the depth of intellectual curiosity.
It isn’t so much that he went from scientific respectability to religious mysticism, as it is that he thought he, himself, had the power to visit Heaven or Hell any time he wished. Among many other things, he also claimed to have been in contact with spirits who inhabited all of the known extraterrestrial planets then known.
Only for cultures which recorded them. If we had astronomical records from Europe in classical times, we wouldn’t need to compare to Asia in the first place.