Kontent from the Kindle
Perhaps the most interesting passage from my Memorial Day Weekend reading. The author is writing about the shocking dearth of archeological remains from approximately 630 to 930 AD and historians' struggles to account for it:
Another school of thought, most influential in Europe, denies the existence of a Dark Age at all and claims that the three hundred years between the early seventh and early tenth centuries never existed, and were merely a fictional creation of scribes working for the Emperor Otto III at the end of the tenth century. The most important proponents of this theory are German writers Heribert Illig and Gunnar Heinsohn.
So, in essence, we're not living in 2014, but rather 1714. And there was no Charlemagne.
Outlandish, sure, but interesting enough to get its own Wikipedia entry: The Phantom Time Hypothesis
The phantom time hypothesis is a revisionist history and conspiracy theory developed in the 1980s and '90s by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß, Germany). The hypothesis proposes that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614”“911), are either wrongly dated, or did not occur at all, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation, and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.
Aside: The period of time from 400 to 1000 AD has been attracting a ton of ink, some of it acrimonious, over the past forty years, much of it spawned by archeological finds. I'm really "digging" it. Expect more posts about this era over the next several months.
