Once More, the Length of the Ramesside Renaissance

In his article "Zur Chronologie der späten 20. Dynastie" K. Jansen-Winkeln has stated that the alternative, short chronology for the reigns of Ramses IX, X and XI and the era called whm mswt would be unworkable from an administrative point of view because it ascribes implicitly dated documents (e.g. the Turin Taxation Papyrus) to the wHm mswt, which he deems "a serious problem for storage" and therefore "a priori very improbable". Here it is argued that his criticism is merely a strawman of his own making and ultimately a serious underestimation of the skills of the Egyptian scribe.

2021

Chapter 1: Setting the Scene …………………………………………………. Chapter 1: Setting the Scene How certain can we be about what happened in the past? In his thought-provoking book, On 'What is History?', published in 1995, historian Keith Jenkins argued that, apart from some relatively trivial details such as dates, most views about what happened in the past, such as the causes of particular events, are determined by current political and philosophical theories [1]. Some would go further and suggest that even the dates need to be viewed with suspicion. That applies not only to far-distant times, where a degree of uncertainty is generally acknowledged, but also to more recent ones, where it is not. Towards the end of the 20 th century, a significant number of intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe, including the Grand Master of chess, Garry Kasparov, and a nuclear scientist, Eugen Gabowitsch, embraced the theories of the Russian statistician, Anatoly Fomenko (first presented in English in 1994 in the two-volume book, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Materials and its Application to Historical Dating [2]), and maintained that the Roman and medieval periods had been artificially extended by many centuries as a result of misunderstandings and deliberate deceit. In subsequent books, Fomenko and his colleagues, particularly Gleb Nosovsky, continued to develop the thesis that all the surviving sources of information about events during the classical and early medieval periods were fabricated during the 16 th and 17 th centuries AD, initially by Joseph Justus Scaliger and subsequently by Denis Petau (also known as Dionysius Petavius) and others. Hence, most of the supposed histories of those earlier periods were actually based on peoples and events from the first half of the second millennium AD, with several sequences of false early histories often being created from a single genuine sequence from a later time. So, for example, in the view of Fomenko and his colleagues, Byzantine history from AD 830-1143 was a copy of that from AD 1143-1453, and was also the same as English history from AD 1040-1327. Byzantine history from AD 378-830 was similarly a duplicate of English history from AD 640-1040, both being reflections of the same Late Medieval origin [3]. Furthermore, some sequences of repeated events could stretch over a much longer period of time that those mentioned above. For example, in Fomenko's proposed scheme, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans which supposedly took place in the 13 th century BC, the war to depose the last king of the Romans, Tarquin the Proud, in the 5 th century BC, the Roman civil war in the 1 st century BC, the Roman civil war in the 3 rd century AD, the war to defeat the Gothic kingdom in Italy in the 6 th century AD, the German invasion of Italy in the 10 th century AD, and the war for the throne of Sicily in the 13 th century AD, were all the same event, with the key participants, Achilles, Publius Valerius, Lucius Sulla, Emperor Aurelian, Narses, Emperor Otto I and Charles of Anjou all being the same person [4]. During the 1990s, in Germany, author and publisher Heribert Illig produced a model for shortening the first millennium AD which became known as the "Phantom Time Hypothesis". According to Illig, the history we now associate with the period between August 614 and September 911, for which (in the view of Illig) very little archaeological evidence has been found, is completely fictional [5]. A book in English in support of this concept, written by Emmet Scott, was published in 2014. Illig had suggested that Emperor Otto III, in collusion with Pope Silvester II, may have moved the calendar forward by three centuries to associate his reign with the start of the second millennium AD. Scott commented that this change could have passed unnoticed "because of the general ignorance of history among the population, and by the confusion that reigned throughout Europe regarding calendars and dates" [6]. For many years, in Germany, Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist at the University of Bremen, had provided staunch support for Illig's hypothesis but he later produced a new theory which argued for a much greater shortening of the first millennium. Heinsohn gave a preview of it at the 2012 Conference of Quantavolution in Naxos and he then presented his overall scheme in outline in Alfred de Grazia's Magazine of Quantavolution in 2013, the first of an ongoing series of short articles about aspects of his theory in the same magazine. In Heinsohn's view, the artificial stretching of the first millennium was not a consequence of the deliberate invention of false histories but of the chaos caused by a major catastrophic event. Evidence of this was then wrongly interpreted to indicate a number of local events taking place at different times. According to Heinsohn, relatively minor events which are believed to have occurred in different parts of Europe during the 230s, 530s and 930s were manifestations of a single huge event which brought an end to civilised life throughout Europe. In this scenario, the activities of the emperors regarded as ruling from Rome between AD 1-230 and ones ruling from further east between AD 290-520, as well as the activities of rulers in northern and northeastern Europe between AD 701 and AD 930 (including the Carolingian Franks), were all taking place at the same time. This triplication of the history of a single 230-year period would in itself result in a false extension of the timescale amounting to 460 years and, considering the situation as a whole, around 700 years of history, from the 3 rd to the 10 th centuries, would already have been completed before the date when it was supposed to have started. Working back from present dates, Emperor Augustus would have been on the throne in AD 700 so, from that point of history to the end of the Early Medieval Period in Western Europe, in AD 1000, there would have been a period of just 300 years, not 1,000 years as generally supposed [7]. Meanwhile, in Britain, Steve Mitchell, an amateur archaeologist, had rejected Illig's hypothesis, but considered it possible that the history of the first millennium had been artificially extended for a shorter period at an earlier time. In 2008, he argued that the English monk Bede, who was the first to use the AD system of Dionysius Exiguus for historical purposes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed, according to the author, in AD 731) may have made errors in the AD dates he allocated to certain events. Mitchell raised two particular concerns. One was that it appeared from Bede's history that almost nothing of note had happened in England between the reigns of the Roman emperors, Marcian and Maurice, whose accession dates, according to Bede, were AD 449 and AD 582, a span of 133 years. The other was that Early Medieval documents were often dated simply to the year in the current 15-year indiction cycle (introduced for taxation purposes during the reign of Constantine the Great). Putting these two factors together, it was quite possible that Bede had over-estimated the timescale of this period by one or more indiction cycles. Mitchell subsequently went beyond this and, on the basis of perceived historical and archaeological gaps, began to develop arguments that the 250-year-long Early Anglo-Saxon Period (which encompassed the reigns of Marcian and Maurice) may have been artificially extended by up to 200 years [8]. In 2018, Patrick Giles introduced to English readers the work of Tóth Gyula, a Hungarian researcher who maintained that there were serious problems with the conventional view of the chronology of the fifth-century AD. From a comparison of the conventional chronology of that period with what was said in the Chronicon Pictum (a lavishly-illustrated account of Hungarian history written during the Late Medieval Period), Gyula came to the conclusion that, confused by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar after the Chronicon Pictum was written, modern scholars created a chronology for the 5 th -century in which a period of around 25 years was duplicated, with analogous events being separated by around 44 years. According to Gyula's theory, the period conventionally dated to AD 407-433, which included the sack of Rome by the Goths, was the same as that conventionally dated to AD 451-476, which included the sack of Rome by the Vandals. No complete contemporary history of the 5 th century had survived, so Gyula envisaged a process in which later scholars struggled to piece together a the west. In Egypt, events continued to be dated from the first regnal year of Diocletian, even after the end of his reign. Thus, despite the fact that Diocletian had persecuted Christians, the Christians in Alexandria used this system to date the years in their Easter Tables, which gave future calendar-dates for Easter Sunday determined on the basis of a 19-year lunar cycle. The Diocletian Era system, subsequently renamed the "Era of Martyrs" by Christians (the first attested use of this being in year 359 of the Era), is still used by the Coptic Church in Egypt today. The chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, which consisted of 528 yearly entries, began with the first year of Diocletian. Although the Diocletian Era dating system was not a major feature of this chronicle, Theophanes noted that Anastasius I came to the throne in the 207 th year of Diocletian and was succeeded by Justin I in the 234 th year of Diocletian. John of Nikiu, writing in Egypt, noted the death of Emperor Heraclius in the 357 th year of Diocletian. According to the Chronicon Paschale, the first regnal year of Diocletian, from which the years in the Easter Tables were reckoned, corresponded to the consulship of Diocletian (his 2 nd ) and Aristobalus [17]. Dating by reference to the consuls appointed for a particular year was the traditional system of the Romans. The historical...

Let's face it, we all do it. We study a given subject, and soon enough we run into the usual scarcity of original sources, those that would enable us to understand exactly what had happened in the past and allow us to answer the most important question in historical research: WHO did WHAT, and with WHICH, and to WHOM? Often enough, running into a dead end is the result of incompetence and inexperience. People do not know where to look for the right information. But all the expertise and experience in the field one may possess, cannot overcome the fact that the guitarists of the past whom we set out to study, with a few notable exceptions, left a negligible paper trail. A few manuscripts, some letters, and an insignificant public record of their performances, editions and the reviews thereof. More often than not, we are facing a dreadful lack of information, particularly when the subject matter is one which is close to our current interests, and important for us to understand. The usual procedure, and I have been guilty of it just like many others, is to project our own knowledge and understanding backwards in time, and assign it to persons who lived two centuries ago, and thus decide what events could have taken place. Speculations and hypotheses, when based on carefully studied available information, while they may not be conclusive and trustworthy, may still point the way for future research. The problem is that when such hypotheses are pronounced with the assumed expression of authority, accompanied by a flood of irrelevant footnotes, often referring to Internet pages that no longer exist, they are taken by the uninformed as established fact.

Since I did not possess an official PDF-file, the following text is a reconstruction of the published article, on the basis of the final draft in MS Word. I have tried to eliminate all discrepancies, but some minor ones may have escaped my attention.

1425 BC in the orthodox chronology (although some argued that the beginning of the reign of Thutmose III might be pushed as early as c. 1530 BC, to reach the latest possible limit of the radiocarbon dates). A similar discrepancy between carbon and historical dates was found by Manfred Bietak and colleagues at Tell el-Dab'a in Egypt, where samples from a palace of Thutmose III gave radiocarbon dates well over a century too old, a pattern that was repeated in earlier strata at the same site [6]. Another publication dating from 2013 was Radiocarbon and the Chronologies of Ancient Egypt, a collection of papers written by participants in an interdisciplinary project set up in Oxford to investigate the discrepancies found at sites in Ancient Egypt and Santorini between the results of radiocarbon dating studies and prevailing archaeological interpretations of the chronology. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cranfield in the UK, together with colleagues from France, Austria and Israel, radiocarbon-dated over 200 plant samples from Egyptian objects in museum collections, fine-tuning the results using modern statistical techniques linked to established historical information taken mainly from Shaw's The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. (The paper in Science mentioned in the first paragraph of this section was a preliminary report from this project.) The scatter of radiocarbon dates for samples from each reign were compared to the archaeological dates for the start of the reign, as given particularly in the work edited by Shaw and another edited by Erik Hornung and colleagues. The former source was referred to as the "high chronology" (HC) and the latter as the "low chronology" (LC), although they were almost identical for reigns in the second half of the 18 th dynasty and the whole of the 19 th and 20 th dynasties, and for the reign of Thutmose III in the first half of the 18 th dynasty. (Note that, because of constraints of space, we shall concentrate our attention largely on data relating to the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th dynasties throughout the remainder of this section.) The mean of the scatter of radiocarbon dates was generally higher (i.e. earlier) than the archaeological dates for the start of each reign in these systems throughout the period of the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th dynasties, although the start of the reigns in the HC always fell within the 95% probability range when the historical input came from the work edited by Shaw. Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen of Liverpool University argued that historical data from ancient Egypt, taken in conjunction with corresponding data from the Near East, gave good estimates of dates for reigns during the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th dynasties, and he suggested that the work of the radiocarbon scientists might help in the search for even more accurate dates, whereas attempts to reduce the timescale of this period were "a sheer waste of everybody's time". In contrast, Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist from Bristol University, maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that the conventional timescale of the Ramesside Period of the 19 th and 20 th dynasties could be "a case of overstretch". A third Egyptologist, Manfred Bietak from the University of Vienna, began his contribution by commending the open-minded approach of the radiocarbon scientists at the Oxford Laboratory, after first expressing his general concern that scientific evidence was increasingly being used "in an uncritical way to support many specific views and arguments". He went on to write, "This article tries to explain why from an archaeological-historical point of view the high Aegean chronology, based on radiocarbon chronology, does not work out and that a date of the Thera eruption in the late 17 th century BC seems not at all to be possible" [7].

Chapter 1: Setting the Scene …………………………………………………. Chapter 1: Setting the Scene How certain can we be about what happened in the past? In his thought-provoking book, On 'What is History?', published in 1995, historian Keith Jenkins argued that, apart from some relatively trivial details such as dates, most views about what happened in the past, such as the causes of particular events, are determined by current political and philosophical theories [1]. Some would go further and suggest that even the dates need to be viewed with suspicion. That applies not only to far-distant times, where a degree of uncertainty is generally acknowledged, but also to more recent ones, where it is not. Today, a significant number of intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe, including the Grand Master of chess, Garry Kasparov, accept the theories of the Russian statistician, Anatoly Fomenko (first presented in English in 1994 in the two-volume book, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Materials and its Application to Historical Dating [2]), and believe that the Roman and medieval periods have been artificially extended by many centuries, as a result of misunderstandings and deliberate deceit. In subsequent books, Fomenko and his colleagues, particularly Gleb Nosovsky, developed the thesis that all the surviving sources of information about events during the classical and early medieval periods were fabricated during the 16 th and 17 th centuries AD, initially by Joseph Justus Scaliger and subsequently by Dionysius Petavius and others. Most of the supposed histories of those earlier periods were actually based on peoples and events from the first half of the second millennium AD, with several sequences of false early histories often being created from a single genuine sequence from a later time. So, for example, in the view of Fomenko and his colleagues, Byzantine history from AD 830-1143 was a copy of that from AD 1143-1453, and was also the same as English history from AD 1040-1327. Byzantine history from AD 378-630 was similarly a duplicate of English history from AD 640-1040, both being reflections of the same Late Medieval origin [3]. Furthermore, some sequences of repeated events could stretch over a much longer period of time that those mentioned above. For example, in Fomenko's proposed scheme, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans which supposedly took place in the 13 th century BC, the war to depose the last king of the Romans, Tarquin the Proud, in the 5 th century BC, the Roman civil war in the 1 st century BC, the Roman civil war in the 3 rd century AD, the war to defeat the Gothic kingdom in Italy in the 6 th century AD, the German invasion of Italy in the 10 th century AD, and the war for the throne of Sicily in the 13 th century AD, were all the same event, with the key participants, Achilles, Publius Valerius, Lucius Sulla, Emperor Aurelian, Narses, Emperor Otto I and Charles of Anjou all being the same person [4]. During the 1990s, in Germany, author and publisher Heribert Illig produced a model for shortening the first millennium AD which became known as the "Phantom Time Hypothesis". According to Illig, the history we now associate with the period between August 614 and September 911, for which (in the view of Illig) very little archaeological evidence has been found, is completely fictional [5]. A book in English in support of this concept, written by Emmet Scott, was published in 2014. Illig had suggested that Emperor Otto III, in collusion with Pope Silvester II, may have moved the calendar forward by three centuries to associate his reign with the start of the second millennium AD. Scott commented that this change could have passed unnoticed "because of the general ignorance of history among the population, and by the confusion that reigned throughout Europe regarding calendars and dates" [6]. For many years, in Germany, Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist at the University of Bremen, had provided staunch support for Illig's hypothesis but he later produced a new theory which argued for a much greater shortening of the first millennium. Heinsohn gave a preview of it at the 2012 Conference of Quantavolution in Naxos and he then presented his overall scheme in outline in Alfred de Grazia's Magazine of Quantavolution in 2013, the first of an ongoing series of short articles about aspects of his theory in the same magazine. In Heinsohn's view, the artificial stretching of the first millennium was not a consequence of the deliberate invention of false histories but of the chaos caused by a major catastrophic event. Evidence of this was then wrongly interpreted to indicate a number of local events taking place at different times. According to Heinsohn, relatively minor events which are believed to have occurred in different parts of Europe during the 230s, 530s and 930s were manifestations of a single huge event which brought an end to civilised life throughout Europe. In this scenario, the activities of the emperors regarded as ruling from Rome between AD 1-230 and ones ruling from further east between AD 290-520, as well as the activities of rulers in northern and northeastern Europe between AD 701 and AD 930 (including the Carolingian Franks), were all taking place at the same time. This triplication of the history of a single 230-year period would in itself result in a false extension of the timescale amounting to 460 years, and, considering the situation as a whole, around 700 years of history, from the 3 rd to the 10 th centuries, would already have been completed before the date when it was supposed to have started. Working back from present dates, Emperor Augustus would have been on the throne in AD 700 so, from that point of history to the end of the Early Medieval Period in Western Europe, in AD 1000, there would have been a period of just 300 years, not 1,000 years, as generally supposed [7]. Meanwhile, in Britain, Steve Mitchell, an amateur archaeologist, had rejected Illig's hypothesis, but considered it possible that the history of the first millennium had been artificially extended for a shorter period at an earlier time. In 2008, he argued that the English monk Bede, who was the first to use the AD system of Dionysius Exiguus for historical purposes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed, according to the author, in AD 731) may have made errors in the AD dates he allocated to certain events. Mitchell raised two particular concerns. One was that it appeared from Bede's history that almost nothing of note had happened in England between the reigns of the Roman emperors, Marcian and Maurice, whose accession dates, according to Bede, were AD 449 and AD 582, a span of 133 years. The other was that Early Medieval documents were often dated simply to the year in the current 15-year indiction cycle (introduced for taxation purposes during the reign of Constantine the Great). Putting these two factors together, it was quite possible that Bede had over-estimated the timescale of this period by one or more indiction cycles. Mitchell subsequently went beyond this and, on the basis of perceived historical and archaeological gaps, began to develop arguments that the 250-year-long Early Anglo-Saxon Period (which encompassed the reigns of Marcian and Maurice) may have been artificially extended by up to 200 years [8]. An extension of a similar length, but at a time even later than that supposed by Illig, was proposed by Zoltán Hunnivari, forming what he termed the "Hungarian Calendar". On the basis of retro-calculations of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena, Hunnivari claimed that AD 960 was the same year as AD 1160 and almost two centuries of history have been fabricated to fill the space between these dates. According to Hunnivari, writing in From Harun Al-Rashid up to the Times of Saladin, the revision to the Christian Calendar was made by Pope Innocent III in AD 1016, with that year becoming AD 1206 at a stroke. Hunnivari wrote (p. 87), "The resetting of the calendar did not cause any difficulties since the Christian calendar before was used in only a very narrow circle of the Western Church" [9]. The one characteristic that these, and other, revisionists have in common is a belief that surviving historical sources which appear to have been written prior to the 16 th century AD are unreliable, in whole or in part. The extreme view, of course, is that taken by Fomenko, who maintains that all such documents were written during or after the 16 th century, by Joseph Justus the completion of Gregory's History, and the first continuation of this finished in the year said to be 63 years before the end of the millennium, shortly after Charles (Martel) had driven back a Saracen invasion from Spain led by Abd ar-Rahman. That is generally taken to indicate a date of AM (E) 5937, which would be consistent with information provided about the reignlengths of Frankish kings from the conclusion of Gregory's History to this point [14]. Many sources focusing at least in part on the Roman Empire, including the Eusebius-Jerome chronicle, similarly dated events according to regnal years of rulers and recorded their reignlengths. The long-enduring system dating events to the year of Diocletian emerged from this. Diocletian, who brought stability to the Roman Empire after a series of civil wars, was the first emperor to be born in the east and he spent most of his life there, appointing others to govern the west. In Egypt, events continued to be dated from the first regnal year of Diocletian, even after the end of his reign. Thus, despite the fact that Diocletian had persecuted Christians, the Christians in Alexandria used this system to date the years in their Easter Tables, which gave future calendar-dates for Easter Sunday determined on the basis of a 19-year lunar cycle. The Diocletian Era system, subsequently renamed the "Era of Martyrs" by Christians (the first attested use of...

Chapter 1: Setting the Scene How certain can we be about what happened in the past? In his thought-provoking book, On 'What is History?', published in 1995, historian Keith Jenkins argued that, apart from some relatively trivial details such as dates, most views about what happened in the past, such as the causes of particular events, are determined by current political and philosophical theories [1]. Some would go further and suggest that even the dates need to be viewed with suspicion. That applies not only to far-distant times, where a degree of uncertainty is generally acknowledged, but also to more recent ones, where it is not. Towards the end of the 20 th century, a significant number of intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe, including the Grand Master of chess, Garry Kasparov, and a nuclear scientist, Eugen Gabowitsch, embraced the theories of the Russian statistician, Anatoly Fomenko (first presented in English in 1994 in the two-volume book, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Materials and its Application to Historical Dating [2]), and maintained that the Roman and medieval periods had been artificially extended by many centuries as a result of misunderstandings and deliberate deceit. In subsequent books, Fomenko and his colleagues, particularly Gleb Nosovsky, continued to develop the thesis that all the surviving sources of information about events during the classical and early medieval periods were fabricated during the 16 th and 17 th centuries AD, initially by Joseph Justus Scaliger and subsequently by Dionysius Petavius and others. Hence, most of the supposed histories of those earlier periods were actually based on peoples and events from the first half of the second millennium AD, with several sequences of false early histories often being created from a single genuine sequence from a later time. So, for example, in the view of Fomenko and his colleagues, Byzantine history from AD 830-1143 was a copy of that from AD 1143-1453, and was also the same as English history from AD 1040-1327. Byzantine history from AD 378-830 was similarly a duplicate of English history from AD 640-1040, both being reflections of the same Late Medieval origin [3]. Furthermore, some sequences of repeated events could stretch over a much longer period of time that those mentioned above. For example, in Fomenko's proposed scheme, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans which supposedly took place in the 13 th century BC, the war to depose the last king of the Romans, Tarquin the Proud, in the 5 th century BC, the Roman civil war in the 1 st century BC, the Roman civil war in the 3 rd century AD, the war to defeat the Gothic kingdom in Italy in the 6 th century AD, the German invasion of Italy in the 10 th century AD, and the war for the throne of Sicily in the 13 th century AD, were all the same event, with the key participants, Achilles, Publius Valerius, Lucius Sulla, Emperor Aurelian, Narses, Emperor Otto I and Charles of Anjou all being the same person [4]. During the 1990s, in Germany, author and publisher Heribert Illig produced a model for shortening the first millennium AD which became known as the "Phantom Time Hypothesis". According to Illig, the history we now associate with the period between August 614 and September 911, for which (in the view of Illig) very little archaeological evidence has been found, is completely fictional [5]. A book in English in support of this concept, written by Emmet Scott, was published in 2014. Illig had suggested that Emperor Otto III, in collusion with Pope Silvester II, may have moved the calendar forward by three centuries to associate his reign with the start of the second millennium AD. Scott commented that this change could have passed unnoticed "because of the general ignorance of history among the population, and by the confusion that reigned throughout Europe regarding calendars and dates" [6]. For many years, in Germany, Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist at the University of Bremen, had provided staunch support for Illig's hypothesis but he later produced a new theory which argued for a much greater shortening of the first millennium. Heinsohn gave a preview of it at the 2012 Conference of Quantavolution in Naxos and he then presented his overall scheme in outline in Alfred de Grazia's Magazine of Quantavolution in 2013, the first of an ongoing series of short articles about aspects of his theory in the same magazine. In Heinsohn's view, the artificial stretching of the first millennium was not a consequence of the deliberate invention of false histories but of the chaos caused by a major catastrophic event. Evidence of this was then wrongly interpreted to indicate a number of local events taking place at different times. According to Heinsohn, relatively minor events which are believed to have occurred in different parts of Europe during the 230s, 530s and 930s were manifestations of a single huge event which brought an end to civilised life throughout Europe. In this scenario, the activities of the emperors regarded as ruling from Rome between AD 1-230 and ones ruling from further east between AD 290-520, as well as the activities of rulers in northern and northeastern Europe between AD 701 and AD 930 (including the Carolingian Franks), were all taking place at the same time. This triplication of the history of a single 230-year period would in itself result in a false extension of the timescale amounting to 460 years and, considering the situation as a whole, around 700 years of history, from the 3 rd to the 10 th centuries, would already have been completed before the date when it was supposed to have started. Working back from present dates, Emperor Augustus would have been on the throne in AD 700 so, from that point of history to the end of the Early Medieval Period in Western Europe, in AD 1000, there would have been a period of just 300 years, not 1,000 years as generally supposed [7]. Meanwhile, in Britain, Steve Mitchell, an amateur archaeologist, had rejected Illig's hypothesis, but considered it possible that the history of the first millennium had been artificially extended for a shorter period at an earlier time. In 2008, he argued that the English monk Bede, who was the first to use the AD system of Dionysius Exiguus for historical purposes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed, according to the author, in AD 731) may have made errors in the AD dates he allocated to certain events. Mitchell raised two particular concerns. One was that it appeared from Bede's history that almost nothing of note had happened in England between the reigns of the Roman emperors, Marcian and Maurice, whose accession dates, according to Bede, were AD 449 and AD 582, a span of 133 years. The other was that Early Medieval documents were often dated simply to the year in the current 15-year indiction cycle (introduced for taxation purposes during the reign of Constantine the Great). Putting these two factors together, it was quite possible that Bede had over-estimated the timescale of this period by one or more indiction cycles. Mitchell subsequently went beyond this and, on the basis of perceived historical and archaeological gaps, began to develop arguments that the 250-year-long Early Anglo-Saxon Period (which encompassed the reigns of Marcian and Maurice) may have been artificially extended by up to 200 years [8]. An extension of a similar length, but at a time even later than that supposed by Illig, was proposed by Zoltán Hunnivari, forming what he termed the "Hungarian Calendar". On the basis of retro-calculations of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena, Hunnivari claimed that AD 960 was the same year as AD 1160 and almost two centuries of history have been fabricated to fill the space between these dates. According to Hunnivari, writing in From Harun Al-Rashid up to the Times of Saladin, the revision to the Christian Calendar was made by Pope Innocent III in AD 1016, with that year becoming AD 1206 at a stroke. Hunnivari wrote (p. 87), "The resetting of the calendar did not cause any difficulties since the Christian calendar before was used in only a very narrow circle of the Western Church" [9]. The one characteristic that these, and other, revisionists have in common is a belief that surviving historical sources which appear to have been written prior to the 16 th century AD are unreliable, in whole or in part. The extreme view, of course, is that taken by Fomenko, who to the compilation of the first of these sources are generally consistent with each other and with other evidence from the same period, including consular information inscribed on stone [16]. From the last consular year mentioned in the Chronography of 354 to the end of the Eusebius-Jerome chronicle in what was stated to be the 6 th consulship of Valens and the 2 nd of Valentinian the Younger, the Hydatius fasti gave 24 years, with generally consistent details being given in the chronicles of Prosper of Aquitaine and Cassiodorus, as well as the Chronicon Paschale. From that point until the end of Prosper's chronicle in the consulship of Valentinian III (for the 8 th time) with Anthemius, this source, together with the chronicles of Cassiodorus and Marcellinus Comes (Count Marcellinus), the Chronicon Paschale and the Hydatius fasti, gave 76 years, with very similar details. For example, all four chronicles noted the accession of Marcian in the consulship of Valentinian III (for the 7 th time) and Avienus. After the end of this period, the Chronicon Paschale and the chronicles of Marcellinus Comes (with its continuations) and Marius of Avenches all gave 86 years to the final consulship of a commoner, that of Basilius, in the reign of Justinian I (a total of 843 years after the consulship of Corvus and Pansa, and 570 years after Augustus assumed imperial powers). After that, the role of consul was incorporated into the duties of the emperor [17]. Another...

The Politics of History as a School Subject in Hong Kong, 1960s-2000 (doctoral dissertation, University of Hong Kong)), 2000